Road Trip - Pt. 2 More Recording

The whole reason for the trip was to record some of Paul’s songs. Some of the songs we had played together a long time ago and some were new to me. My main instrument is bass and I think I have a pretty good feel for Paul’s music, so that was the easy part. But I also played slide guitar and mandolin for some of the songs, and what I tried to do for those parts was to play something that added musical accents, but didn’t overwhelm the lyrics and vocal parts. I tried playing a fiddle part on one of the songs, but didn’t feel that I would be able to pull it off.

If you’ve never recorded, the procedure goes something like this (or at least this is how we did it this time)… First the bass and guitar were recorded on two separate tracks. We played those together so we had the timing down, and didn’t have to use a click track. Since we were playing together, if one sped up or slowed down, then the other would follow.

Recording bass and guitar tracks

After we had a take that we liked, we would add the “musical accents.” I would either play a slide part or mandolin part while listening to the already recorded tracks in headphones. Once we had a good take of whatever incidentals were to be added, then Paul would put down a vocal. That’s pretty much it for recording. After that there’s mixing and mastering, but we only had time for a rough mix on the tracks. Well, that’s not entirely true, we had a friend of Steve’s come out and do a better mix on five of the songs, but since we didn’t have all of the recording  finished, we couldn’t get them all mixed. It was fascinating to watch Steve’s friend Chase mix down the basic tracks using Logic Pro. Chase had previously done some work at Southern Tracks Studio, so he certainly knew what he was doing, and I was just amazed about how computerized it all is now. I remember doing some recording in the early 1990s and it was all analog with tape and faders, and trim pots. Now everything is digital, and you manipulate the sound by digitally adjusting the wave form (I think, I’m certainly no expert.)

Rough mix of "Could Anissa Have Been Saved" with random pictures from recording