Day of Glass

[ateolf]

Yesterday was pretty badass for our practice. Paul showed up, then Jacques. I had realized the other day that Paul already recorded an extra full bass track on "Cameras" so instead of rerecording a bass track, we just had to drop one (the original one). Then we took it upon ourselves to finally execute an idea that I've had in my head for months: recording the breaking and stomping on of glass to vocode with one line in "Battle Chant." So we went to the hardware store and bought a pane of glass and other stuff like some gloves and junk. We also swung by Jacques's place so he could pick up his handheld recorder (so we could have two including mine to have more sound sources to mix together). Okay, so we take the glass out to the alley behind my place, threw it down andm stomped on it a bunch (I put on some old dress shoes for the task, to have a hard stepping-on surface between the glass and my feet). Need I mention how incredibly fun all this was? Lots of stomping, sweeping the broken glass back together, stomping some more, picking up bigger fragments and throwing them to the ground. THAT'S the kind of shit being in a band is all about!! (?) We took pains to sweep it all up; but before we threw it away, we put it all in a big tub and recorded things like sliding the glass around and jiggling it and (most fun of all) all of us kicking the damn thing. Ooh, it was awesome. As we were wrapping up, Ryan arrived. It was funny 'cuz a car was coming up the alley (we didn't know it was him) that nobody ever uses, I though this branch on the other end effectively made it blocked off, but some guy's yelling something at us about glass. He'd seen Jacques's FB status update. Well, now we've got all the band together. Ryan wanted to overdub a few parts of his synth on "Battle Chant" So we found the few (mostly very short) sections and he put some new awesome stuff in the places. Paul and Ryan ended up leaving. Jacques went with Mary Beth and I to Huey's. Then we came back and worked some more on production stuff. I took the minutes of glass smashing and cut and pasted them and mixed them into 100 tracks of 15 seconds, all together: making our session of three guys with a little pane into a huge thing. Put the newly mixed file back onto the handheld Tascam and hooked it up to the vocoder. The whole section of my singing is only about 7 seconds. So, after tweaking it a bit, we got the extra track of my voice sounding like broken glass. After a minute of playing around with another (fruitless) idea, I realized I had the two sound sourdces (glass and voice) routed backwards into the vocoder (i.e. the glass was modulating my voice instead of the other [more standard] way around). It had sounded awesome, but I was curious as to how it sounded the other way. That sounded awesome too, but more importantly, they sounded awesomest, fullest, most complete together! Then Jacque had wanted to throw some synth on "Cameras" so we worked on that, first he tried the Prophet but ended up going with the Moog. It sounded really good. Finally we ended with him adding some drum synth to "Histrionics." We used the Syncussion controlled by a foot pedal (since he was worried about hitting a pad with a stick so late at night). Dialied in a few sounds and Jacques squeezed the pedal in time and it sounded really good. Woo! Paul came back over. We got to play him what we'd done as well as what he did to his drums the other week. It was a long day and only consisted of what might seem like "minor" details, but it feels like one of the most productive days of the whole recording process. Okay, I did get up kinda late and I have so much grading to do. Gotta get on that. Back to work-mode.