We’ve been making slow but steady progress on our upcoming full-length studio album, “Stay Awake,” and we’re excited about how great the songs have been coming out. We’ve been sad, however, that our fans haven’t been able to hear the new tracks, which are so much better than our old basement recordings. That ends now! Today we announce the official release of “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P.
Cover art for “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P
[UPDATE: The full-length album is now out, so we have taken down the 3P. The 3 songs on the 3P can now be found on the Stay Awake album]
“What is a 3P?” you may ask. Well, it’s longer than a single, which is usually two songs, and it’s shorter than an EP, which is usually 4-5 songs. We understand that it is the hip new way to release music — the recently released book The New Rockstar Philosophy dedicates an entire chapter to the concept — and it fits in well with the fast pace of the modern internet-driven music industry. “Release early, release often” is the mantra, and that’s one bandwagon I’m happy to jump on because it means our fans get to hear awesome new music sooner rather than later. I’ll be honest, the three songs that we chose to release simply happen to be the songs that are the closest to being finished with the whole recording and mixing process. )The other 9 songs on the “Stay Awake” album still need some tweaking before we’ll be ready to release them.) I think you’ll find they fit extremely well together, however, and I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do.
If you like the songs, please buy them, we are offering them under a “pay what you want” program on our Bandcamp store with a suggested price of $3. All profits go towards making the upcoming “Stay Awake” album awesome and fronting the costs for live shows to support the album. If you choose to buy the old EP at a live show or from CD Baby, we’ll throw in a download code for “The Grinder’s Tale” 3P for free!
We’ll be blogging more in the days to come about the 3 songs on the 3P: Flight III, The Grinder’s Tale, and Last Warning. In the meantime, just relax and enjoy the tunes 🙂
A couple months ago we went to Atlantic City with the amazing Rob Scheuerman as our photographer to do a photoshoot for the upcoming “Stay Awake” album, hoping to get some cover art. I don’t think we were successful, unfortunately, but we did get a lot of pretty pictures.
This stupid sign vanished less than two weeks before we wanted to take a picture of itWe had a very specific vision for our cover art, involving a road sign on the Atlantic City Expressway. Along the sleep zone where drivers tend to drift off with fatal results, sometime in the late 80s highway officials placed a series of signs reading “Stay alert”, “stay awake”, “stay alive”. We wanted to take a picture under the “stay awake” sign and make that the title of our album. Now, keep in mind that the signs have been there for decades. Two weeks before the photoshoot, Brian drove by them to check that they were still there, and they were in fact still there. He programmed the location into his GPS to make sure that we couldn’t miss it, and we intended to return to that spot just as dawn was breaking so that we could get a sunrise. However, the day of the photoshoot when we arrived at the spot, the signs were gone, leaving only the posts that they had been standing on. It was pretty ironic, in the Alanis Morissette sense. Or perhaps just unfortunate, as Ed Byrne would call it.
Here we are looking rather annoyed, sitting on the guardrail near where the signs used to be
Since we couldn’t take the picture we wanted for the cover art, the secondary objective of just taking cool photos around Atlantic City for publicity purposes became the main point of the day. One goal was to take some pictures that vaguely corresponded to the various songs on the album, such as a picture of us playing poker for “The Grinder’s Tale”.
"Oh man, this is so bad-ass. We should be in Rounders or something there. It's like Nelson is making a very serious comment to me, and I'm studying someone for tells. Or something cool like that."
Check. Another important goal was to get a picture of us with a sunrise or sunset behind us. Since we spent sunrise in a futile search for the missing road signs, we had to make do with sunset. However, the sky was becoming overcast and we were concerned that we would not be able to see the sunset from where we were in Atlantic City. We checked the weather forecast for the area, and it appeared that there might be a break in the clouds over Philadelphia. So we drove hell for leather to the west to get to Philadelphia in time for sunset, in hopes that we would actually be able to see the sun. I think it paid off.
This isn't a sunrise, which is obvious if you know that we're taking this picture from Camden with Philadelphia behind us to the west. But maybe people won't notice.
If you want to see the rest of the photos, they’re up on Flickr, just click the picture below:
Unfortunately, choosing which guitar to record with wasn’t as easy as I hoped. All of our acoustic guitars developed problems during the record sessions, but fortunately they were different problems so we could choose which guitar to use based on which problem would affect the album the least. Now I understand why professional musicians own so many instruments: redundancy! Sure, having a selection of guitars with different properties allows you to produce a wider range of sounds, and having multiple guitars lets you quickly switch tunings while playing live, but I think the most important reason to have a lot of instruments is so you can switch when one instrument breaks down or starts sounding funny.
I am in love with my green Takamine acoustic-electric, named “Kermit”, and I would generally want to use it in any situation. However, recently Kermit has started going out of tune if I play high on the fretboard, and unfortunately many of our songs require me to do that. I didn’t have a chance to get Kermit’s problems checked out at the guitar store before recording started, so I had to use other guitars that were more in tune.
We used Brian’s black Martin acoustic-electric for a couple tracks, most notably “Running Scared”, but for some reason the low E string was sounding much louder and rattle-y than the other strings, which sounded strange. Much of “Running Scared” doesn’t use the low E string and we thought the guitar sounded fine with the parts that do, but this problem mostly eliminated the Martin from the album.
We ultimately used Brian’s Ovation acoustic-electric for most of the tracks, even though something was very wrong with the line out. I thought the line out would be important, but it turned out it wasn’t, we were able to record great-sounding acoustic guitars without it.
Recording acoustic-electric guitars without line-out
For our EP we had two tracks for each acoustic/electric guitar: a microphone in front of the sound hole, and directly plugging it into the guitar’s line out, and that delivered a decent sound. By having multiple tracks for the acoustic guitars, we can mix them together and better control the sound. For example, if the line out has more bass, and the mike over the sound hole has more treble, you can turn up the volume on the line out if you want a more bassy sound. For this album we were hoping to have three tracks for the acoustic/electrics, by adding a third track from a microphone over the fretboard. However, since the line out on the Ovation was oddly quiet and full of static, we didn’t end up using that track, so we just had two tracks, the fretboard mike and the sound hole mike. I think this gave us a deep, rich, and very acoustic sound… the line out would have made the acoustic guitars sound a bit more electric, and I’m not sure I miss it.
Surviving without heat
We could not use the central air in the building while recording anything with microphones, because the fans made noise. It was the middle of winter in New Jersey, it was pretty darn cold outside and, without heat, inside. This problem affected recording the drums, acoustic guitars, and vocals. This may have been less of a problem for Santoro because drumming is a very physically intense activity, but playing guitar really was only exercising one or maybe two arms, there was no way I would break a sweat recording guitar. I compensated by wearing lots of layers, sometimes even wearing my winter coat indoors, and bringing a thermos of hot tea and a thermos of hot rice with me to the studio. It would have been hopeless without space heaters such as the one pictured to the left, and the little faux fireplace in the drum room, which we used to warm our fingers and maintain manual dexterity. It was still pretty miserable, but that’s the cost of the pursuing your musical dreams. If I ever get to build my own studio, I will do my best to make sure it has silent heating and cooling, so that we can keep the studio at a comfortable temperature no matter what we are recording.
My Interview
Transcript:
Brian: Um, this is the end of acoustic day… being our primary acoustic guitarist and our primary interviewer, would you like to ask yourself some questions?
Nelson: [laughter] Well, Nelson, how do you feel about being done with acoustic guitar? Well, me, I feel pretty frickin’ good. I’m sad that Kermit didn’t make it onto this album because I never got him tuned up at the shop, so Kermit is unfortunately absent. But I did enjoy the Ovation and the Martin guitars, they were good.
Brian: Did you enjoy freezing your ass off in that room over there?
Nelson: I did not enjoy freezing my ass off! Funny you should ask. But I had some hot tea and stuff, and I’m all good. I wore my orange hoodie over my headphones, so I was nice and cozy. It’s an accomplishment! I am happy.
Brian: One of your standard questions has been your favorite and least favorite songs to record.
Nelson: I think that Flight III / Flight I came out really good, I’m really proud of that. I am not proud of how I couldn’t play the finger-picking to “Out of Time” despite having practiced it for like years on end. But Brian hit it so it’s all good. And you know, I’ll practice it more and someday we’ll play it live, so… I am satisfied.
Brian: Alright, to be continued.
Nelson: Thank me for the interview 😉
Choosing a bass player for “Stay Awake” was easy. Andrew Angelin is the most talented bass guitarist I know, and I am honored to play with him under any circumstances. He also joined us in the studio the last time we attempted to record this album, which meant that he was very familiar with our songs, and he had had plenty of time to polish and improve his basslines. I think it shows, in cuts like this slap bass riff from “Flight III”:
Technical skill
Andrew does some very technically interesting things with his bass, and I learn something from him whenever I watch him play. I once saw Andrew slide a harmonic, which I didn’t even think was possible. (He had a hard time replicating it consistently, but maybe I can convince him to pull that trick out on a future album.) I think that Andrew’s bass adds a lot of depth to our songs, and that it makes our songs interesting to listen to over and over because you hear something new every time.
Sometimes Andrew plays chords on his bass, which is something I think most bass players never consider doing. You’ll be able to hear this during one of his bass solos at the end of “Where is Bobby McGee?” and at the beginning of “Crossing the Bar” for example, and I think it’s a really nice effect during quiet parts of a song. It’s an effect that may be hard to hear over a full band, so it is only useful in some cases, but it is a technique I rarely hear in rock music and I’m glad to be able to bring it to our listeners. I also don’t usually hear harmonics on bass guitars very often, outside of the records of Jaco Pastorius and other virtuoso bass players, but you’ll be able hear those after the bridge on “Break Free” and once again in the outro to “Where is Bobby McGee?”. The trick to using any technically difficult technique on an instrument is to only use it when appropriate of course, otherwise it becomes a gimmick or just showing off, which some people accuse bands like Dream Theater of doing. Like a spice, you just want to add enough to taste, and I think Andrew has done a good job of moderating his technical chops and only bringing them out for punctuation. (Is that a mixed metaphor?)
Choosing the bass
Andrew decided not to use his own electric bass in the studio this time around… last time he recorded with it he heard some rattling that he thought was undesirable. When Andrew tried out Brian’s bass during rehearsal, he liked it a lot and so that’s what we went with.
When Brian bought his bass in the music store, he didn’t have any reason to expect it to sound particularly good, it’s just an inexpensive Specter bass. However, everyone who hears that bass agrees that it sounds particularly good, and when he brought it in for servicing once, the store guy offered to buy the bass off of Brian. This bass just hit a sweet spot for some reason. It’s somewhat comforting to know that in this world of assembly lines and mass manufacturing that some of the mass produced items come out special, despite all attempts at standardization.
We considered using Andrew’s upright bass for “Contained”, but Andrew decided that track’s jazz-rock sound worked better with an electric bass. He also doubted that he could pull off the ridiculously fast bass fill at the end of the bridge with an upright 🙂 We do try to avoid making our musicians’ lives harder than necessary.
Song charts
This may come as no surprise, but one important thing we accomplished during rehearsal for this album was creating/finalizing song charts for everyone to work from. I felt bad about not creating song charts for our musicians ahead of time before rehearsal, but at least with the musicians writing song charts for themselves at rehearsal the song charts were personalized for each of them. I think next time we would try to write out song charts ahead of time, however, so that we could spend more time playing music at rehearsal and less time writing down the basic chords and song structure. It’s quicker to add embellishments/edits to a basic song chart than to write one from scratch.
The aftermath
After each musician recorded their tracks, we interviewed them about their experiences in the studio. For Andrew’s interview, see the video below:
Transcript:
Nelson: Andrew, you just recorded all your bass for this album, how does it feel to be done?
Brian: All your bass are belong to us now! Andrew: Ha ha ha, um, I feel great man, you know, I’m surprised it all got done on time in one day. That never happens. Brian’s bass was definitely the right tool to use, I’m glad he brought it. I had a blast! I’m surprised that we still have like 40 minutes.
Nelson: What was your favorite song that you did today?
Andrew: I could say “Last Warning” because there is a very funky bass solo… I dunno, that’s a tough one. I mean, I really enjoyed doing Flight II, because I think that bass line really, you know, it does a lot for me, I don’t know why, it’s a groove thing. Maybe “Break Free”, because that one goes way back, you know, that one goes back to early high school.
Nelson: Nostalgia, right?
Andrew: Exactly, yeah.
Andrew: My least favorite song might have been… well, “The Grinder’s Tale” had a tricky bass line, because it just involves a really strange finger stretch, getting those octaves and whatnot. “Vulture” [now “My Private Asylum”], I don’t know why, I feel like I’ve played it before, and I couldn’t come up with any good ideas for it.
Nelson: Not enough new stuff this time around?
Andrew: Yeah, I couldn’t figure out how to make it more interesting for myself. I feel like I just did the meat and potatoes.
Andrew: You know, we’re ahead of time. Santoro was a great choice for the drums, Portrait was the best choice, I’m glad we’re here and not with Mr. Nuzzo’s place.
Nelson: Ha ha ha
Andrew: The scratch tracks really really helped, so I think you guys should be pretty set. Let’s make this thing a killer album.
When Wrong Side of Dawn was searching for a drummer for the “Stay Awake” album, we started with our friends from high school, old bandmates with whom we used to play music. While we were wasting our time attending a liberal arts college and then law school, our friends went to music school and then become professional musicians. If we wanted to pack as much technical skill and quality into this album as we could, those full-time musicians were the obvious people to talk to. The first drummer we asked to record with us was my friend CamilleOlivier, who is currently playing with TV/TV, but his time was already booked up recording a couple albums and touring the world with his full time band. (Big surprise, professional musicians are frequently busy, playing music.) I’m still glad we talked to him because his advice has been invaluable in helping us choose Portrait Studios and make other decisions while recording this album.
The next person we talked to was Anthony Santoro, who had been the drummer in Brian’s high school band Ohm. Santoro is now a sound engineer in Boston, handling the sound for live shows at the Hard Rock Cafe, and when he’s not engineering sound he plays drums with singer/songwriter Evan Michael. Thankfully he was available over winter break and he agreed to join us in the studio. Brian was slightly disconcerted by the fact that Santoro agreed to record with us before he even heard the music that was destined to be on “Stay Awake”. What if our music sucked? I guess Santoro just had that much faith in Brian’s musicianship after playing with him in Ohm!
Starting the recording process
Before Santoro or anyone else recorded a thing, Brian and I laid down some “scratch tracks” of guitar and vocals. Scratch tracks were recommended by The Indie Band Survival Guide to serve as a guide for the people recording so that they would know the basic song structure without having to memorize e.g. exactly how many times the chorus progression repeats and concentrate instead on playing great music. These scratch tracks were recorded quickly and were only a temporary framework or skeleton for the songs, to be replaced with real guitars and vocals once the rhythm section was recorded, and frequently they contained instructions to the musicians such as “Here comes the chorus! One, two, three, go…” instead of (or in addition to) actual singing. Sometimes our recorded instructions were inadequate, and we supplemented it live in the studio with instructions shouted into a microphone and piped into the musicians’ headsets, as Brian does in the video clip below.
We only got one full day of rehearsal in with Santoro and the full band, but everyone’s musical instincts seemed to serve them well and the songs were rocking hard by the end of a very long Sunday. Song charts were prepared, song parts were polished, and we were all on the same page. Recording started the very next day, Monday night, with Santoro being the first to step up to the plate. Santoro and Tom seemed to hit it off right away since they were both sound engineers and drummers, and together they got Santoro’s drums set up and miked very quickly. I helped hand Santoro things from the gig bag but my usefulness was rather limited in this phase. Later Santoro would record individual drum “samples”, hitting each drum and cymbal separately rather than as part of a song, so that Tom can drop in copies of Santoro’s drum sounds into our recordings to make them sound more awesome.
Tracking the drums
Santoro has a knack for making a track rock, but he seems to have a different philosophy of drumming than other drummers I’ve played with in the past. Whereas a drummer like Camille has no doubt that his drums are playing a leading role in a song and follows in the tradition of flamboyant drummers like Travis Barker from Blink-182, Santoro has more of a humble attitude and is always very concerned about stepping on other players’ parts, considering himself to be more of a background instrument, perhaps like Roger Taylor from Queen. This philosophy generally served him well, but when we wanted him to pull out all the stops and take the drums over the top it sometimes took cajoling and convincing. I’m happy to report, however, that once he understood that we *really* wanted him to demolish his drumset, he delivered some of the most intense drum solos it’s been my pleasure to experience. There were also some communication problems when we had very specific visions for the drum parts because Brian and I don’t really play drums, so the best we could do was make noises with our mouths and vague gestures with our hands, or sometimes refer to similar drum parts in classic songs (e.g. “Think the opening in Give It Away!”). Santoro was fortunately very talented at turning our incoherent instructions into real drum parts, and for that I must give him mad props.
Tracking snare and tambourine
I think it’s important to not always use a standard drumset, and while we didn’t experiment with more unusual percussion on this album we did depart from Santoro’s drumset on a couple of occasions. Rather using Santoro’s standard snare on some songs, we got a genuine marching band snare for the more march-y parts, which if I recall correctly includes the opening and end of “Out of Time”. We also used a lot of tambourine on the outro to “Where is Bobby McGee?”, a part which Santoro was initially reluctant to play, claiming he was no tambourine expert. I don’t think any of us could have played the tambourine better / more accurately than he did, and I’m glad we encouraged him to add “percussion” to his credits on the album rather than just drums.
The end result
Ultimately, I think that everyone involved was quite pleased with what we had accomplished. If you want to know what Santoro himself thought, just watch the video interview below!
Transcript:
Nelson: Here we have Anthony Santoro. Anthony, you have just finished tracking all the drums for this album, how does it feel?
Santoro: It feels awesome! … My voice is going out, it’s been a long grueling two days. I’m getting sick, battling the elements, I’m probably going to go get myself some delicious and satisfying McDonalds. I think most people after a big thing they usually go to Disneyland. I’m probably just going to go hit up McDonalds and Wendy’s, get myself some dinner… It’s quarter after 12 in the morning, got an hour and a half drive ahead of me… it’s good times.
Nelson: How are you feeling about the album so far?
Santoro: I think it sounds great! I don’t know who played drums on it, that guy was awful, everything else sounds great though on the album.
Brian: Too bad there’s nothing else [yet] on the album…
Nelson: What’s your favorite song so far, Anthony?
Brian: Or did they all just blend together at this point?
Santoro: I think Flight III was my favorite to track, Flight III was pretty awesome. It’s intense, it’s emotional… If you get the feeling that I wanted to throw my sticks through the window at the songwriter… I didn’t want to do that, you’re great guys.
Nelson: What was your least favorite song?
Santoro: Uhhh… Flight III! Not throwing my sticks through the window at the… Nooo, all the songs I think are great 🙂
I’m happy to announce that Wrong Side of Dawn is recording a full-length album at Portrait Recording Studios in Lincoln Park, NJ. The album is tentatively titled “Stay Awake” and will feature about 12 songs which we attempted to record previously in the Nuzzo sessions but have been polished and updated for this release. We expect this album to be AMAZING once it is finished, Tom Suhey has done a very professional job as studio engineer and we’ve been working with musicians of the highest caliber.
We are almost finished with the recording phase, after having spent most of winter break in the studio. The main thing left to record is some of Brian’s vocals, which should be finished in the next couple of weeks, and then we will move on to mixing. If you want to follow our progress, you can read our microblog on Identica or Twitter, and see photos of WSD on Flickr. We’ve been trying to document the recording process as well as we can, and I think we’ve done a decent job, except for keeping this blog updated. I hope to fix that over the next couple of weeks, by posting accounts of our past recording sessions over winter break and then ideally continuing to post about things as they happen. Stay tuned!
You can now buy our 5-song EP from CD Baby! Within the next few months we expect to have the EP available on iTunes, Amazon, and every other digital retailer that works with CD Baby (pretty much all of them). Karen made some beautiful cover art for us:
Incidentally, you can buy both digital downloads and physical CDs from CD Baby, but due to the expense of manufacturing and shipping physical CDs they cost more than digital downloads and we make less money from them, so we encourage you to purchase the digital downloads from CD Baby. They are high quality 200kbps VBR mp3 files, no DRM, and you can get instant gratification 🙂 If you would like a physical CD but don’t want to pay for shipping, just find either Brian or myself in person and we will happily sell them to you at $5 each.
Every song or album that you purchase from us directly funds our music… for the foreseeable future, all of our money from our music will be going into paying for studio time to record a full length album this winter break. We don’t have a label, so all of our money is coming out of our own pockets. So please buy some of our stuff and help fund more great independent music from Wrong Side of Dawn!
It has been almost a year since we last posted, so I’d like to note that Wrong Side of Dawn is not dead, we have actually been making progress on the album. Sadly, since both Brian and myself (Nelson) are in law school, we’ve only been able to work on the album on vacations and odd weekends. Also, Mr. Nuzzo has frequently been unable to make time for us in his studio, since running a recording studio is not his full-time job (he’s still a high school music teacher). Regardless of the reasons for the delay, today I have an important update for you: the rough mixes of every song we originally intended to have on the album, with the exception of “The Grinder’s Tale” which did not record well. You can listen to the rough mixes in the flash widget below:
[Mixwit is dead]
Once again, these are *rough* mixes, which means that they have not been polished much at all, these songs sound almost exactly the way they did when we recorded them. Before bands publish their music, they generally edit their songs to make them sound better, cutting out mistakes, putting effects on their instruments and voices, making sure the volume levels are all even, etc. We have not done that here, so these songs all sound worse than the finished product will, but I thought it would be best to “release early, release often” and make these songs available in their unfinished state now so that you can see what we’ve been up to all this time. Note that track 5 “Vulture” is not intended to be an instrumental, we just haven’t gotten around to recording the vocals for it yet.
At this point, we may not actually do final mixes of all of the songs that we recorded. Our current plan calls for doing final mixes of 5 of our favorite songs and officially releasing those as an EP. Then we want to go back into the recording studio with a new lineup and re-recording the songs we were less happy with, as well as some new songs that we’ve been writing. Stay tuned and hopefully we’ll have some more interesting news for you later this summer.
UPDATE: Mixwit is dead and so is the flash widget we were using. You didn’t want to hear the rough mixes anyway, the songs will be much better on our upcoming full-length album.
Recording an album has taken a lot more time and money than we anticipated when we first started out… even though we are using a friend’s recording studio (my high school music teacher, Mr. Nuzzo), and we’ve been relatively efficient in using our studio time, we still haven’t quite finished recording the album, and the bills are mounting. Fortunately, we are almost done with the recording phase, with only a few guitars and vocals and other finishing touches left to record. The next step will be mixing all of our tracks.
First comes the “rough mix”, where we select which of the takes of each track on each song that we have recorded will be used for the final product. This is not as straightforward as it sounds: sometimes we will take the best part of each take and cut and paste them together to form one impossibly good take. The idea is to make sure that you record each section correctly at least once, rather than trying to get the entire song perfect in one take. This method doesn’t work very well if you don’t have the same rhythm track under each take, which is why ideally you want to lay down the rhythm tracks first (drums, bass etc.) and then record everything else later. Naturally, the more times you play the song through to add new instruments, the more studio time you use and the more money you burn. You can also lose some “feeling” when the entire band isn’t recording in the studio together. It’s hard walking the line between recording each instrument separately to approach perfection, and recording everything at once to try to save money and add “soul”. I think we struck a decent compromise with this album, but only time will tell.
There was also the issue of having too many takes of each track, making it difficult to decide which takes to keep and which to throw away. Brian solved this problem for his guitar solos on this album by wiping and re-recording each guitar solo until he got it exactly the way he wanted it, leaving us with only one take for each solo by the time we got to mixing. That saves us a lot of time when we go to mix, but he may have burned some extra time in recording using that method. For my vocals and Karen’s backup vocals, we laid down a handful of takes and moved on even if no single take was satisfactory, saving time in recording but burning more time in mixing. Ultimately, you have to decide which method is easiest / most efficient for you, it’s not something you can generalize about. (Of course, if you have oodles of money and time, it doesn’t matter which is more efficient, but we’re not at that level.)
Next we’ll move deeper into mixing, trying to tweak each track and use various effects to get each song to sound precisely the way we want it to, and editing out slight imperfections. The trick with this stage is not to be absurdly perfectionist, setting time limits and knowing when to walk away from a song that is “good enough”, otherwise the album will never get done. We’ll do our best 🙂
After that, if we think it’s worth cleaning up the album to top-40 radio quality, we’ll have to get someone to master the album, polishing our sound to a shiny finish. We’ll see how the album is sounding by then, and how much that process will cost…
I (Nelson) have relocated to southern California for the rest of the semester, so progress on the album will be slow until I return in May, but we’ll start seriously mixing in May, and we hope to release the album to you wonderful people sometime this summer.
Wrong Side of Dawn will be entering the studio to record its first real album this coming weekend (January 6, 2007). We’ve finally managed to put together a full band, thank goodness, and the final lineup for this session is:
Brian Rose: lead guitar, vocals
Nelson Pavlosky: rhythm guitar, vocals
Andrew Angelin: bass guitar
Greg Albright: drums
Steven Stratvert: piano/keyboards
Karen Rustad: backing vocals
We expect to have a finished album, recorded and mixed, by the end of January. Then the next step will be getting album artwork, printing and packaging copies of the thing, and then figuring out ways to sell it. Stay tuned!
I am in love with my green Takamine acoustic-electric, named “Kermit”, and I would generally want to use it in any situation. However, recently Kermit has started going out of tune if I play high on the fretboard, and unfortunately many of our songs require me to do that. I didn’t have a chance to get Kermit’s problems checked out at the guitar store before recording started, so I had to use other guitars that were more in tune.
