Album #2 Studio Updates

For those of you who have been looking for an update on our progress for the new Twenty Committee album, here are a few belated snapshots of our progress to date.

We came home from New York at the end of May with finished drum tracks and plenty of scratch material to build off of in order to track the other instruments.  For a few weeks, we listened back to rough board mixes, getting our bearings and formulating the direction we wanted to go.

In mid-June, Richmond began re-tracking bass parts.  The perfectionist in each musician always says, "Let me play it again -- I can do it better!" but there were also some really great bass tracks from our NY sessions that would have been difficult to top.  Some of them we cut again anyway, in search of more pop or resonance, and the results sound great.  However, some of what you'll hear on the final record is Richmond playing live at Rave's while we were also laying down the drum takes we wanted.

Through the rest of the summer, Geoff reworked his established keys.  He also began addressing some introductory and postlude content, and introduced some new layered synth ideas to the mix.  FYI, Record #2 is another concept album, so there will be recurring musical themes and sounds that we want to incorporate throughout its duration.  Some of this we'll still have to wait for the final mixes to be complete, in order to properly layer the effects and ideas during post-production.  But we can't really help ourselves from fooling around with ideas that we'll revisit later!  Geoff and I have also been occasionally trading lyric ideas for the songs that were last written as we move steadily toward recording vocal parts.  Some big themes the lyrical content of this album will address are as follows: human creativity and its purpose in relation to societal advancement, the ethics of conformity/nonconformity, true productivity, the relationship of individual parts to the whole, human pride and ambition, the quest for self-perfection...

In short, the record will cover life, the universe, and everything.

Joe's mostly been in an observing, cheerleading role, since he did the lion's share of the recording work in NY.  His performance truly shines on this record -- there are so many cool rhythmic things he does that I can't wait to hear with the final mixes.

In the last few weeks -- since the end of August -- it's been my turn to plug in and tune up my guitars.  Some of my parts I'd primarily worked out on the electric in the rehearsal space, but we'd always envisioned them on the acoustic.  So I re-recorded some of the things I did at Rave's on the electric, this time using both regular 6-string tuning and also "high-stringing" a second acoustic guitar to create a more nuanced 12-string sound by blending the two together.  While this method is less efficient than just playing a 12-string guitar, the approach creates dynamic sounds with far more voicing clarity than a traditional 12-string can provide.  The strategy also gives us greater ability to mix and manipulate the final takes.  I still have some more electric guitar work to do on a few of there complex passages of "Forevermore" and "Sparks in the Mind" as well, but other than that it's almost time for me to move on to my auxiliary keyboard sections.

Once we've completed all the instruments, it'll be time to move on to the vocals.  We've (I've) gotten quite a few chuckles from the scratch vocals that Geoff put down to simply direct traffic while we were in NY.  I might actually miss him saying, "Coming up on double chorus!" in the final mix...  That said, I can't wait to start working the actual parts.

Yes, we're taking our time with this project -- in part because we can (I mean, it's been eight years since we released A Lifeblood Psalm, so why rush now?), and in part because all of us are insanely busy.  I'm thankful for Jeff Bishop's expertise at the console, the modern technology that allows us to punch and splice takes without having to endlessly repeat the whole song until we get the perfect take, and for the amazing experience of writing and recording music.

Looking forward to the final product!