Shawn's Retrograde/Life Like Luster Session Diary

[Yogi]

Well, the band was talking recently about maybe getting a rough mix up online somewhere that people could listen to. "A Kick In The Shin" was an obvious choice, because it's basically complete except that I hadn't done the lead guitar yet.

Yesterday I emailed Darin, who I knew was about to get on his motorcycle and travel to Lands Unknown any day now, and asked him if we could do a rough mix of AKITS when he got back.

Turns out he was free last night, and said we could throw it together then if I wanted.

I rushed down to the studio after work, and we set about working on sola stuff. I knew I wanted to play through an octaver pedal, and we ran through the Big Muff distorto-box for good measure into the Peavey Classic 50. I loved the sound we got, but for various reasons, it was a little limiting in what ranges of notes I could play. We ended up keeping a take, and hey, you can hear it right now on MySpace, but I don't know if that's going to be the final one. I like the off-the-cuffness, but I'm not sure I'm thrilled enough for that to be "the one." Lizzy doesn't like it, Pete kinda does. Of course, I'm keeping the sola I did on "Cinnamon Girl" that I didn't much like cuz Lizzy DID like that one. Who knows?

We added some further overdubs over the end section, and then Darin sat down to do a quick n' dirty mix-n'-master. He thought it would be quick and easy, but had forgotten all the weird crap that pops in and out all over the mix. So what's up on MySpace is very rough, but I think it gives a nice idea of what the song will be. It's nice to be able to share a little of what we've been up to for so long.

COMMENT!

[Yogi]

Sangity-sang-sang sang, that's what needs doin', so that's what I done. FINALLY got back down to the studio tonight, and I will be there tomorrow and Friday night, too. I wanted to work on vocals, cuz there's lots yet to do, so.

We first loaded up "A Kick In The Shin", which many of you have been hearing the rough mix of over at MySpace. When we were throwing that rough mix together, I noticed some backup vocals that sounded a little thinner than I wanted, so tonight to warm up I threw down a couple of overdubs to fix that little problem. So, AKITS now sounds slightly changed from the rough, so as I said somewhere else (I lose track of where I post anymore) don't get USED to that mix.

I HAVE decided that I am indeed keeping that very strange guitar solo, I kinda really love it now. It just needed to grow on me. So I think AKITS is really and truly all done being tracked now.

So then we loaded up "Fair Use", on which everything is tracked except all the vocals. There are lots of backup counter-melodies throughout (I've realized that this new album is very heavy on backup vox) and I thought I'd go through and get all of those. It took a while, since many of them have a very breathy tone, and it's hard to get that sound. Then it's hard to harmonize to it once you DO have it, and then you get tired because it's hard to move all that air you have to move to keep that breathiness going. We managed to get all those bits, and then we moved to another backup part where I got to really belt out some stuff, so that was a relief.

When a part happens more than once in a song, we jump around doing all the parts where it happens, so I can keep focused on getting the notes right for the repeated bits; what's funny is, when you listen back, even though the part is technically the same, there are big tonal differences in how I sang the various repeats. Darin and I talked about how this is just one of those things that makes recording "the old-fashioned way" cool - yes, I could just sing the part once and we could cut and paste it everywhere else it goes (and I do just that on demos, since I'm just trying to get ideas down for them), but it's just not the same. All the variety adds up to extra COOLNESS.

I had hoped to do some work on the "Fair Use" bridge, but we didn't quite get there. Tomorrow Lizzy is coming by and I'm going to have her double some of what I did tonight, and then do similar doubling on backups on some other songs. Maybe we'll tackle the bridge then. And then Friday, I'll probably do more singing. The following weekend we all go in as a band to track the last basic for this project, for a new song called "Handbasket." There are lots of crazy vocals on THAT one, too.

Oh well, I guess that's just what I do. I am now sleepy. More tomorrow.

[Yogi]

More sangin... some by me, most by Lizzy.

Pete wasn't available last night, but Lizzy was, so I cajoled her to come down and lay down some backup vocals on several tunes. There are all sorts of vocal textures we're using on the album, and there are some that require isolating Lizzy all by her lonesome, rather than submerging her in a big group round-robin type deal. By the end of the evening, I think we finished off all such instances. There were four tunes we touched, "Mold On My Soles", "Dusty Demonatrix", "Sublimeinal", and "Fair Use." Not a whole lot of interesting anecdotes to tell really, I'd show Lizzy what I was looking for, and she'd go for it until she got it. In most cases she was doubling something I had already laid down.

Things are sounding good, and we're chipping away, but boy. There's still an awful lot of work to do. I'll be back at it tomorrow night.

[Yogi]

There have been two sessions at DDP's since I last wrote. The good news is that we got stuff done at both. The bad news is that it still feels like we're going in slow-motion sometimes.

I realized that I've been suffering from some low-grade "something" over the last few days - I'm kinda congested and my throat has been really sore. It's had the effect of making my voice sound a little "scratchy", and Darin mentioned that while we've been tracking. Part of me is cool with having a scratchy voice on things, I think of it as sort of having an "effect pedal" of sorts for my voice - we go for wide tonal variety on everything else, we might as well do it with singing, too. Of course, it's not really intentional if that's just what your voice sounds like on the day you want to record it. But I'm cool with it. I just want to get work done, and if it sounds "scratchy" well, then that's how it's going to sound.

I know from experience that one can sing just fine even when ill, but there is a psychological problem that happens - you FEEL like you can't sing, even when you can. Back when I was doing Top 40, we would have week-long engagements for weeks on end with no days off. I would typically get sick several times a winter, and I couldn't call in sick, since who could sub for me? So there were many times when I got up on stage and played 3-5 sets a night singing lead on probably 70% of the material, where in between verses I'd be behind my amp desperately blowing my nose, and going through a bag of Hall's cough drops every couple of days. It was absolutely miserable doing that, but I remember hearing some live recordings made of us during one of my sick weeks, and we sounded great. You couldn't tell that I was out of my mind with fever and snot.

So, I haven't been that bad off, obviously. Just sayin'. I went off on a tangent. Forgive me.

Friday night we did a bunch more sangin', if I recall. I fixed some crappy backups on "Mold On My Soles" that I noticed listening to the rough mix. Then we went back to "Fair Use" that Lizzy and I had worked on the other night. First we attacked the bridge section which has a great big multi-track harmony vocal section, mostly based around one very long note, a great big "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH" that lasts nearly four bars. OK, three-and-a-half bars. A long note, indeed.

When I was doing the first pass, I noticed the "scratchiness" I mentioned before. If there was just going to be one vocal there, such a dose of scratchy would probably keep us from using the take. The fact that I was going to overdub several more layers meant that it didn't matter.

The bridge section took a while, but we got it.

Then we moved to the verses on "Fair Use", which feature a very different kind of melody than I usually do. It's sounds kinda like my impression of Anthony Kiedis, with hopefully a lot fewer out-of-tune notes. This singing style is pretty far out of my comfort zone, and so I was being pretty hyper-critical of myself. Also, just getting through the part requires a lot of energy, and with the run-throughs we did getting the vocal sound right, I was pretty burnt even before we started. Couple this with my throat "issues", and I noticed pretty early that my control was leaving me, and so I think we might have gotten one of the three verses finished before I called it a night.

I hadn't expected to be able to work on Sunday, but DDP was free, so wheeee! Chastened by the difficulty of the "Fair Use" verses, and still feeling a little "sensitive throated", I opted to move to "Inscrutable You" which had lots of little backing bits left to be done. We had done quite a bit of "group" backups on it, and the lead vocals are complete. Still, there are lots of little things that pop up here and there, and they're all in harmony, so it's like 5 or 6 little "mini-Queen" bits that show up now and again. After much effort, I got all the bits that I can do finished, except for the "opera guy" vocals that happen at the very end. I took a crack at those, but... not so well. You'll just have to hear it - obviously, I need to do those earlier on in a session, when I'm fresher. There's one more remaining vocal that needs doing on IY, and we're going to have a guest vocalist attempt it. It's just too high for me to hit, even in falsetto.

So I was done for vocals, and we still had a few hours, so time to switch to gee-tars! I was excited to do something besides sing after so many exhausting vocal sessions.

We turned our attention to "Right Outside", a song that's kind of gotten lost in the shuffle for these sessions - Lizzy has yet to track her bass on it, even though Pete did his drumming like, what, last year? When we cut the drums, we had been rehearsing it as a very long, meandery sort of hippie jam, and so we left all that in when we tracked the drums, and listening back to it, it just seemed to take forever to get anywhere. So I recently used my newly acquired Pro Tools Powers to edit out the bits that we didn't need, so we have a newly economical arrangment. Sometime in the summer of '05 I had laid down some tasty acoustic guitars on the track, so that's we played to this weekend, drums and acoustic guitar, and a scratch vocal of me counting into all the sections, saying things like, "...one... TWO... BASS SO-LO NOW!"

The chorus has these big power chords that crash in and make a mess of things, a very very simple part. I knew that what I wanted to do was have the sound of an amp that's turned up so loud that it complains the whole time. If you're playing an electric guitar in the same room as a very loud amplifier, if you stop playing for one instant, the thing will feed back like crazy, just because of the volume. Generally for most rock stuff, you don't need the amp turned up that loud, and I also usually sit in the control room when I'm tracking. For this song though, I knew I wanted to be out there with the amp, cranked, so that in all the holes where I wasn't playing, there would be random feed back going on. Darin suggested I play a hollow-body instrument as well, as hollow-body instruments feed back even more (one of the things that prompted the invention of solid-body electrics, in fact).

So I played that Gibson some-number-or-other that I used on "Sublimeinal." Sorry, I'm bad with guitars that have numbers as their model name. I have to say that I love that instrument like crazy, in fact, I think I'll say that it is my very favorite of all of Darin's guitars, and that I'm going to use it from now on in every conceivable spot I can. It plays like a dream and sounds incredible. If it has one drawback, it's that the groove in the bridge saddle for the low string isn't very deep, and since I kind of play aggressively, I have a tendency to keep knocking the string out of the saddle, which makes a really ugly noise, and now that string is out of tune, and we have to start over. OTHER THAN THAT, though, that guitar is awesome.

And it did just what I wanted. We got some gigantic guitar sound with a Peavey classic head into a Marshall cab, and I stood out there with it and it made all sorts of unholy noise. That guitar is one of those ones where there are seperate volume controls for each pickup, so I turned down the volume of the neck pickup, and used the pickup switch as an "on-off", so that I could make the racket start when I wanted it to (like Edward Van Halen did on his "You Really Got Me" solo). That might have been the most fun I've had playing guitar on this project.

After that bit, I went back into the control room to do another more musical rhythm guitar bit that happens late in the song, that didn't require crazy feed back noise. I first intended to use a Tele for it, and then I tried a Strat, but the thing is that part is impossible for me to play correctly on certain necks, so I kept trading guitars for one that would allow me to perform accurately. I tried a Les Paul, but I couldn't get that working for me, either. I ended up back on the hollow-body Gibson, and we used a different amp (which, come to think of it, I don't know what we used, as Darin set it up without me). I struggled with the chords (it's a tough part), and Darin noticed that on the trickiest bit I was using a fingering that was making things harder for me than I realized - when he pointed that out, I stopped doing the offending thing, and suddenly the part wasn't as hard to do! Amazing what an outside eye (who plays guitar) will see!

I had to bail around 9 PM-ish, and we need to do another doubling pass of that section sometime soon. But when Lizzy comes in to do her bass bit on the track, she'll have a lot more to play to than she was expecting.

Next sessions are this weekend, when we do the last basics, for "Handbasket." We'll probably touch on other tracks as well, but that's the major goal for the weekend.

COMMENT!

[Yogi]

Drums are done.

It's nice to have one thing completely finished, and we finally do, after this last weekend, where we went in to hammer out one last basic track, for a song called "Handbasket." We had it kicking around in various forms for a couple of years now, and sometime a month or two ago I had some inspiration to finish up an arrangement and make a demo. Lizzy and Pete liked it enough to want to record it now for this project, so for the last several weeks in rehearsal, we've done nothing but play that song many times. Exciting, no?

I had a feeling that, after our normal Friday night setup, that it wouldn't take all that long to get a good take. In fact, on Saturday morning, we played the tune through exactly one time, and Pete felt that it was good enough to keep after a few small fixes were made. It took a lot longer to fix the four sections he wanted touched up than it did to actually play the song once. I guess such is life in the studio, though.

After Pete was happy, we focused on Lizzy's bass bits, and I think she trashed everything she'd done on the live take and started over. She played a couple of full passes before going through and patching up little wronglets here and there.

There's one brief section right after the gittar sola that I knew we'd have to essentially write a part for in the studio - my demo idea was really blurry and chopped together, and Lizzy didn't really have a solid part in mind in rehearsals. So I knew coming in that we'd have to make up something. So we did - Lizzy got everything else in the song finished first, then I went out there made some suggestions and showed her what I was doing on guitar there, and she made up a new part on the spot. Apparently it's tough to play, but hey. That's why God invented the punch-in button.

Once all rhythm section stuff was complete, we had a couple of hours to spare. I ran out and picked up sammitches, and once those were consumed we moved to the backup vocals that required everybody.

We had done some rehearsing of these parts as well, which probably helped a little bit - but I can't say as we really drilled the parts as would be really necessary to get them easily in the studio. With the studio microscope in full effect, what sounded decent unamplified in the rehearsal studio (with 20 other bands flailing away all around us) turned out to be not so great. We spent the rest of Saturday getting not a whole lot of work done, trying to get takes of all three of us singing together around the mic. I wanted to do it that way because it sounds so good when we all sing in a room together, but our under-rehearsal bit us. And of course, it's harder to do it that way because all three of us have to be on for a take to be good.

This work was exhausting.

Finally it was time to leave on Saturday, and we'd gotten only a little bit of "keeper" backups for the bridge of HB.

We reconvened on Sunday morning, and went right back at it. We first finished up bits of backups on the HB bridge, with pretty quick success. Rather than wade back into the quagmire that is the HB chorus backups, I decided we should switch gears and start working on the backups on our Van Halen cover.

We had practiced these parts barely at all.

It didn't take long before we got bogged down in the same mess that we'd been in on Saturday. It's just really hard to get three people who aren't necessarily professional singers to be perfect on a take all at once. It starts to wear on you when you do take after take after take. I'm somewhat used to this, since the same thing happens to me often when I'm in working on my vocals. Some days, you just can't get a note, no matter what you do. All kinds of studio tricks come into play to get a decent take.

We eventually resorted to some of these - we started doing takes one-by-one rather than all singing at once, we'd try combinations of two of us at once, we'd get "not bad take", use the Auto-Tune plugin to get a "perfect reference" to sing to, and try to match THAT. Once we switched gears like this, we started to get some work done, though it was still slow going and we didn't finish as much as I had thought we might. I guess the parts you think will be "easy" aren't always so.

All that might sound really discouraging to read - but the fact is, when we listened back to what we did finish, the vocals sound great. You'd never know how much we struggled to get them if you weren't there.

I enjoyed the process, even if it was really draining, because I liked having the whole band out together in the studio, listening to everybody's takes, and making suggestions, offering encouragement, etc. We were all in it together, rather than being alone in front of the mic while everybody else is napping, outside, etc. I liked that we slogged through the work all together.

Pete and Lizzy had to leave earlier on Sunday to make a rehearsal, so Darin and I adjourned to our favorite local burger emporium. Once stuffed, we used Lizzy's Taylor 714-CE (I remembered a model number!) to add an acoustic overdub on HB, and then another on the bridge of the VH cover. That guitar sounds beautiful, and added just what I was looking for. And then that was it for the weekend.

We have another week to 10-day break now, and then there will be 2-3 weeks where I can hopefully get in to do a whole buncha work before I go meet up with family for a big shindig in October.

At least the drums are done.

COMMENT!

[Yogi]

Tonight marked the seventh day in a row I spent some time at Darin's studio. It might be the most concentrated blast of activity I've had on this project since we started.

It's also looking like tonight's was the last session for October. I'm heading off to a two-week vacation tomorrow afternoon, and Darin's going to be gone in late October and early November.

Nope, we ain't done yet. Lots more still to do.

There were some milestones reached, though. Lizzy is now all finished playing bass on the album. She's still got some vocalizing to do on a couple of things, but the main bulk of her work is finished, as Pete's has been since we recorded "Handbasket" some weeks back.

So now it's mostly all up to me, to finish up the remaining guitars on the 14 tracks, and then all those vocals that still ain't done yet.

We are very close to being finished with rhythm guitars, and as this previous week began, I had the idea that we might have been able to have them wrapped up before I flew off to vacation. What I didn't count on that at least one of the songs was going to absolutely kick my ever-lovin' ass from a guitar standpoint, and that some seemingly innocuous backup vocal parts were going to turn into a nightmare of epic proportions.

There are few things less fun than churning through a difficult session only to have nothing that's usable from your efforts. This doesn't happen all that often, and it doesn't happen every day, but it does sometimes occur - and we've had a couple of sessions like that this week.

Overall though, I have to say that the last week has been a blast. Even during difficult and frustrating sessions, with Darin and I the laughs keep coming. In so many ways it would be impossible for us to be more different from each other, but I think it's those differences, and our mutual respect for each other, that makes hanging out in his studio so much fun for me. I've found that the older I get, the more difficult it becomes for me to make what I would consider to be lasting friendships. Darin and I have been through a lot together, and done a lot of great work besides. Through all of that, we've become good friends, and I couldn't be more grateful about that fact.

And its because Darin and I are such good buds that I knew that we'd get almost nothing done in our first scheduled session last Wednesday night. He'd spent the last several weeks either zooming all around the country on one of his motorcycles, or flying to lands unknown in the middle of California. When we haven't hung out for a while, the first thing we do is update each other on what we've been up to, and that means long hours of stories and laughs. It's happened so many times now that I kind of just build the "catch up" session into the schedule now when we start doing work after a long layoff. It's not like he charges me for the time, so hey. We did get one thing done that night, which is we finally got the "cowboy opera" vocals done on the end of "Inscrutable You", so my vocals for that track are officially finished.

All caught up, we got started Thursday evening determined to get some work done. I brought in my new extravagance for its maiden voyage in the studio - a brand-new, Made in the USA Mike Lull TX guitar. This is Mike's Telecaster model. I've written in this diary about how much I'd been enjoying playing Darin's Tele models for this album, and I'd been thinking a lot about getting a new six-string instrument, especially for playing live. For the last couple of years on stage, I'd been bringing a 7-string instrument and one six-string. The sixer is tuned to "Drop-D flat" tuning, since I write so many songs using that tuning. I'd been handling any six-string tunes that required standard with the 7-string. For the most part that works, but there are things you just can't do on a 7 when you're trying to play something written on a 6. It's been a real drag playing songs like "Throw Me A Bone" on a 7-string guitar, but hey - it was one less guitar to drag to a gig. But lately the hankering to have a sixer in standard tuning has been outweighing my desire for a simpler onstage life.

So: mix in my newfound love of Teles with the desire to have a new six-string around, and I did what any guitar player would do: drop entirely too much money on a new Lull TX Telecaster (I'm joking around here - Mike Lull instruments aren't cheap, but I do not regret buying my TX in the least. I'm thinking of getting one of his Strat models next year).

I think I'd possessed the TX for all of two whole days, and had played it for maybe ten minutes total when I brought it to the session Thursday. The first thing I did when I pulled it out of the case was hand it to Darin. He's a guy that doesn't see the point of spendy instruments (and that's an area where we're both generally in "agreeance"), but even he had to give up the grudging respect to this beautiful example of Mike Lull's handiwork. Darin said that "this guitar almost plays itself." Would that that were true! It would have saved me a lot of heartburn this week.

We jumped into finishing up rhythm guitars on "Right Outside" which we'd begun a few weeks prior. Using the TX through the Fender Twin we doubled up the ending sections that we'd already laid down. With all "Right Outside" beefy bits thus accomplished, we dialed up a clean sound for the early sections of the song, and man, does the new Lull sound beautiful. You'll have to hear it. Sad to say that I forget what amp we actually used for the verse bits. I do know that we then ran the Lull through the big Leslie cabinet to add some sympathetic "sweetening" in various sections. I think that was all she wrote for the electric guitar on that song, and I think we packed up for Thursday after finishing up the Leslie stuff.

I drove home Thursday night with a disturbing tickle in my throat and a runnier-than-normal nose: the International Signs for You Are Coming Down With Something.

Great! Thank you, Recording Gods!

Friday: the Disturbing Symptoms were still there, but I hadn't developed a full-on dose of anything, that I could tell. I didn't have "head cold voice", which would prevent me from doing any vocals (since who wants to sound like THAT on a record), though my throat was a little sore. My lead was absent from work on Friday, and I had NOTHING to do, so I bailed early and got to Darin's in the early afternoon. It was going to be almost like having another full day in the studio. Impending cold be damned, I was stoked.

And now I'm realizing that I don't remember everything we've done this week, because I waited until a week had passed before writing about any of it. Oh well, I shall persevere, but know that what follows is my best approximation of what we worked on. It may not be exactly accurate, and I may be leaving things out.

Friday I wanted to start with singing. We pulled up "Fair Use" to work on. A whole bunch of backups had already been finished by Lizzy and me, and then at some point we'd started working on the lead vocal. As I mentioned in my account of that session, the lead vocal melody of this song is very different from what I've previously done before, and I struggled with it when we worked on it last time. In fact, after we listened to what I had done with it thus far, we elected to trash everything I'd done and start over.

See, this is what I was talking about when I mention sessions where you work for hours and don't get anything good.

Lucky for me, even with a sore throat, Friday afternoon I was in fine voice. I know this because Darin mentioned it right away - he knows my voice better than anyone else at this point, and he can tell the difference between days when I've really got it going on and days when I just do not.

So, we attacked the verses on "Fair Use" with vigor. There are three of them, and I was concerned with not making them all sound exactly the same. I wasn't sure what to do to accomplish that, and so I was just going to hope that between Darin and myself we could find some creative solutions. There was a line in verse 2 where Darin suggested that I break up the phrase between two different vocal takes that overlapped. We did the overdub for the line, and while doing it I tried an idea for the delivery that involved doing a "character voice." Darin loved it, wanted to double it, then I wanted to add a harmony, and then it was all a blur with the IDEAS and all, and things snowballed through the remaining verse work. For verse 3 we found a place for a female vocal, and I laid down what it should be - we'll replace it later with Liz Aday, a friend of Lizzy's we're bringing in for some guest backups and spotlight parts on certain songs. The work took a while, with lots of ideas tried, and lots of wrong turns, but by the end, Darin and I were really pleased with what we got. After a dinner break, we attacked the remaining vocals I had left to do, which were the chorus bits. In live performances of this song, there haven't been any backing vocals, so I've made my lead part into sort of a combination of the melody of the lead and backing vocals I'd written. Obviously for this studio version, we recorded the backup bits as I wrote them, so my current hybrid lead melody wasn't going to work. I knew this was the likely case going into the studio, and I guess if I had been a good boy, I would have written a new melody that jibed well before going to record it. Well, I didn't, but this was one case where my ill preparation didn't hurt. I thought up a new variaton for the lead vocal on the spot, my voice still not failing me, and we got it down with no more than the typical amount of elbow greese and effort.

And here's where my memory is failing - I think we did more than just sing on "Fair Use" on Friday, but I can't remember for the life of me what else we recorded. In any event, we finished up my vocals on the tune, so all that's left are the replacement bits we need to get from Liz Aday, and then there's a big group section to do on the ending, which we'll do with everybody out in the room, singing and clapping and carrying on. Darin says that "Fair Use" could not be more pop if it tried. I think of all of my songs as pop songs, even if I realize they aren't perceived by everyone else that way. So I don't know. It's certainly not like anything else in the catalog.

Saturday morning? Afternoon? One of those, anyway - I wanted to switch back to guitaring, and I wanted to record the rhythm stuff for "Handbasket". This is a drop-D song, and I wanted the tone to be LARGE. After re-hearing the giant feedback guitars on "Right Outside" the other night, I wanted to use that same setup for "Handbasket", the ES-135 through the Peavey Classic 50 head. Darin trumped THAT idea by also setting up the Groove Tubes Soul-O amp next to the aforementioned rig. We had to do some soldering brain surgery on an old chorus pedal to use as a line splitter for the two amps, but the tone we heard once dialed in was Most Righteous.

Oh! I know what else we did Friday - we did the two remaining acoustic guitar overdubs we needed to do on the "Handbasket" bridge! I used Darin's new Carvin acoustic guitar which he had picked up from the Carvin store in Long Beach on one of his recent travels. That Carvin acoustic has a built-in tuner right on the side of it! How cool is THAT?

Phew - I'm glad that the memory brain cells sometimes still fire off successfully. I don't even have a substance abuse problem I can blame my memory lapses on. Sheesh.

Back to it:

So, we had our giant two-amp rhythm tone, and recorded pass #1 of "Handbasket", which took a couple of hours to get right. But man, it sounds great. Again, there was a little bit of this song's rhythm part which I kinda needed to make up on the spot, 'cuz live I play a different thing, but luckily I had an idea, and I was even able to execute it correctly. So, no heavy rock song can be complete unless you DOUBLE the rhythm guitar part, right? So, we did, and we used TWO DIFFERENT amps, and I switched instruments, this time using my regular Strat. The amps this time were the Fender Twin and I think the Peavey Classic 50 4x10 combo (which is what I'm using live these days, because I like Darin's so much). I remember reading interviews with Vernon Reid in the 90's and hearing that he would set up four amps cranked all the way up when recording Vivid, so now I can say that I have a rhythm track that features four loud amps all howling at once, too - AND - OUR giant guitar sound is all done with SINGLE-COIL PICKUPS, cool, huh? My life as a guitar geek is now complete or something.

There are a few little "decorative" guitar parts that "Handbasket needed as well, and we went right ahead and did those, too. One bit features a bit of wah-wah (the old Budda wah was used), and then there's another spooky part that requires a very difficult left-hand stretch to play right, but boy, many times the chords that you really have to reach for sound the coolest, so it was worth it. We did two tracks of that bit, recorded an octave apart, and we ran the high one through the Vibra-King so we could have the amp tremelo going. It doesn't even sound like a guitar.

Anyway. "Handbasket" is sounding amazing, and it was shockingly easy to record.

Foreshadowing. I will note that we failed to knock on wood while recording "Handbasket." Foreshadowing.

Now that "Handbasket" guitars were all done and sounding so mighty, I wanted to get cracking on the remaining backing vocals left on it. If you read previous entries about the original band sessions for this song, we spent the day after getting the rhythm section basics done on it attempting to get a whole slew of "group backups" laid down. Some of the parts were gonna be tough to get done with Pete, Lizzy, and me all singing them at once (everybody had to nail their parts at the same time), but I had believed that we could do it fairly easily.

Boy, had I been wrong. I don't remember how many hours we killed trying to do the (seemingly simple) chorus backups, but in the end we only ended up with a few wobbly takes for one of the three choruses. At least we were able to get some stuff done later on the bridge, but we had failed utterly to get the chorus stuff done. It was these vocals I wanted to work on now, figuring I'd just lay them all down myself, one part at a time. I've done this sort of work scores of times in the past (see: Any Raw Flesh?, Salve).

At first, work was going swimmingly. The part in question required four tracks of vocals, two of which were singing in unison. We did the unison bits first, and it seemed like I was having another good day, as we blasted through all three choruses with a reasonably small amount of effort. Finishing these bits up, we switched to track three, and I started laying down the high harmony part. It was a little tricky, but we got them done, too. All right! Time for track four, the low harmony! The hard part was done!

Uh oh.

Tracks 1-3 each had only two notes in them, uttering the phrase "That's fine" over and over. "Fine" is held out for a couple of beats.

On track four, there's actually some movement on the word "fine." But it's still only two notes.

Unfortunately, and unexpectedly, the two-note low harmony became The Attack Of The Two Notes That I Absolutely Could Not Sing In Tune. And when I could sort of get it in tune, it would clash mightily with the three tracks I'd already laid down.

Wait: now THOSE tracks aren't in tune?

AND: you know how the notes in track four are supposed to move around a bit? Turns out that on tracks 1-3, I cut off the "fine" note TOO EARLY for the movement in track four to work the way it was supposed to.

So not only could I not sing part four in tune - but now, ALL of tracks 1-3, for all three choruses, had to be done over.

This was not my most favorite moment.

My confidence was now dashed that I could sing anything in tune, so I came into the control room to play the parts I needed to sing on guitar, so that I would have a guide when I was singing, a reference to something that I could know was right. By the time we got that laid down, it was late, and the previous few hours of frustration had tired me out. I went home, happy about the day's early guitar triumphs, bummed by my inability to get some simple vocal bits done.

So - now what? What day is it? Sunday? I had a tax appointment early in the day. Yeah, I know, GREAT FUN, huh? That thar's the price one pays in the USA for running one's own business, lots more tax appointments (which result in tax PAYMENTS, of course). Unfortunately, the streak of session difficulty only continued.

I wanted to re-attack the "Handbasket" chorus vocals straightway - they weren't going to beat me, no sir! So we did. I knew that we'd have to trash everything from Saturday night and start over, so we did. I was raring to go. I had my new guides down. Today was going to be different.

It wasn't. Boy, was it ever NOT different.

I started with the low part again. The one I couldn't get. Singing with a guide did help some, in that I knew right away when I was out, which was often. I don't know if it's how this particular note sits on top of the chords or what (initially it's not necessarily a "pretty" harmony), but I struggled and struggled and struggled. We eventually got low parts down that we thought we usable. So then we started with the middle bits, the part I'd have to do twice. I was having control issues from the get-go. Overcompensating for making the phrases too short the night before, now I'd made the low harmonies go for too long. I was running out of air before the notes were done. We got one track of the middle part done, so started working on the double. We got one chorus through of the double done. We listened back with the two "unison" parts playing together - and they sounded not very together.

90 minutes in on Sunday, and I'm already getting demoralized. I don't know if it was Darin or me that suggested moving to something else, but I was glad to do it.

Time again for rhythm guitar. Time for "Dusty Demonatrix", the one honest-to-god Heavy Metal song on the new album, full of chugging notes played on my 7-string guitar with the low string tuned down to A. I was in a great mood for it, I needed to channel my aggression into something at that point.

We fired up our Giant Guitar Two-Amp Solution once again. The sound that came out was positively leviathan-like.

You know what's coming.

This song kicked the crap out of me.

I'd rate myself as a pretty decent guitar player. I'm good enough generally to play the songs I make up. Almost every song I come up with starts out being difficult for me to play, but over time I eventually get the hang of the tunes, and end up being able to play parts that I can be proud of.

I am not, however, a metal guitar player.

I also rarely practice beyond band rehearsals. The years where I would sit for hours with the metronome click-click-clicking at my side are long-gone (though I would love to have the time to do that again).

Playing metal guitar is hard to do. Anyone who thinks that heavy metal musicians aren't "real" musicians, or that they suck BECAUSE they play metal is just ignorant (see: Meshuggah).

I thought that since I don't really write metal songs, that since I'm kind of a dabbler in the form, that I could get away with not putting in any extra practice time before trying to record "Dusty Demonatrix." I could get away with playing my version of what heavy metal guitar is, is what I was thinking. In rehearsals, DD sounded pretty darned good, but all musicians know that you don't have to play perfectly when you're playing music live with musicians. No one can hear well enough to really focus on what they're doing, there's weird lights, and oh yeah, there's a crowd over there you're supposed to be entertaining.

But now we were in studio-microscope mode. Every foible is right there, in plain sight.

I was doomed, but we soldiered on anyway. I figured, hey, I've slogged through difficult sessions before and come out on top.

Not this time. I think the first pass through the song, punching in a million times, took nearly five hours. There is a section at the end where Pete unleashes an absolute fury of double-bass drumming that isn't on my original demo, and hearing him in rehearsal inspired me to come up with a stuttering guitar part that would make Dave Mustaine proud, but I was just not able to pull it off. We punched a version of it together of course - hey, you can do anything with digital editing these days - but I knew it wasn't going to pass muster. Exhausted, Darin and I slunk off to dinner, and when we returned, we went through the ordeal of doubling everything with another pass.

I know I'm going to have to do it all over again - but this time, AFTER I've spent some serious time woodshedding the parts. Mostly I'm good enough to skate by in these situations - but "Dusty Demonatrix" was having none of that shit.

Which means that Sunday was pretty much a wasted day, all told. At least we had some laughs.

Monday night, a fresh face! Lizzy was coming in, to start the last bit of bass work she had left. The main object of our attention would be "Right Outside", a song I wrote when I was about 20 years old for a band called Skeptics. Lizzy is playing a version of the bassline written for the tune by the Skeptics bassist, another Berklee alum like Lizzy. Of course, Lizzy is adding a lot of her own "flava" to the part.

I'm not the only one who has a new toy to record with, Lizzy brought in her new Sadowsky bass, which apparently is like way awesome for real bass players. I'm sure she'll have a lot to say about it in her own account. Darin likes how it sounds, but the basses on our sessions always sound good. The reason I'll never be an engineer (besides lack of engineering talent) is that I can't differentiate between degrees of good bass sounds. But it sounded good to me!

I think we spent about 3.5 hours on "Right Outside" Monday night, get almost everything done, except for a little bass break that occurs about halfway through. Lizzy had to react to some slight arrangement changes that our adding in the rhythm guitars had caused, and I asked her to make up some new fills on the spot. She did a really great job, coming up with some very creative bits. Apparently, at least one of them is "unplayable" in real-life, but as I mentioned, we're in Digital Audio Land, and we can do anything.

We worked until pretty late, and by the time we left we had almost all of Lizzy's lines for "Right Outside" finished. All that remained was a quick touch-up of a melody section, and then in the middle, a "bass solo" spot.

Which is where we picked up again tonight, my seventh night in a row at DiPietro Sound. Skeptics bassist Aaron Brown had played the breakdown on "Right Outside" with a Crybaby Wah pedal, and I always loved how that sounded, so I asked Lizzy to do the same. Instead of a Crybaby, she used the purple Budda Wah, which if you know anything about Lizzy's obsession with the color purple, really makes it the only wah she should be using. I have this weird idea for little fluttery bits in the background of this part of the song, so Lizzy went out there and made a bunch of weird noises which we recorded and I'll muck around with later.

"Right Outside" all finished, Lizzy got out a Roscoe fretless bass, for her LAST BASS BITS OF THE PROJECT. The song: "Our Guarantee", which used to be called "Nugget" before I wrote words for it. It's short and sweet, but I think Lizzy felt a little rusty with her fretless chops, and thought it might take her a while to get a good performance. She was pretty wrong about that, she only played a couple of takes all the way through before we got one that was worth patching up. Said patches accomplished, we were done! Lizzy has no more bass to play! Huzzah!

And that about does it for studio activity for October. I'm away for a couple of weeks, and then Darin is gone again, but then we'll be back. Early November should provide us with a few opportunities for getting work done. The year has really flown by, and I'm sad that it's looking obvious that there's no way Life Like Luster will be finished before 2006 is over. Sorry about that, but you know the old saw - indie (no) budgets and all. I really do think the album is going to be something, though. I like every song we have for it right now.

[Yogi]

Well, back from the east coast and I've managed to get back into the studio this week as well.

This diary has sure turned into a super huge long thing, hasn't it? I can't imagine someone actually starting at the very beginning of it and getting caught up to the present. You'd have to be pretty freaking dedicated. There are times when I really don't want to add yet another entry on to this thread, but I figure I've come this far, I've got to keep slogging on to the bitter end.

So this week thus far we've done three more vocal sessions. I feel like I've done a million of these, but when I look at the list of stuff yet to do, it's like we're never getting anywhere.

Three more sessions done now, and I think I'm about 50% finished now with the vocals on the album. We've got 14 tracks we're working on, and I've now finished 6.75 of them.

I know, after all we've done, it seems like I should be farther along, right?

I can't think of any details that would be all that exciting to share about the sessions this week, other than I can mention we finished up the "Sublimeinal" vocals (of which there are a shocking amount), and we're about 50% done with the ones on "Our Guarantee." There WAS one absolutely hilarious unplanned moment that happened on Monday, but I can't tell you about it here without giving away the surprise. Let's just say that those of you who actually read this thing will almost certainly get to hear it for yourselves eventually. It was funny. And it got recorded.

Tomorrow I'll get most of the day in the studio and it's my goal to get the rhythm guitars done on "Only Shallow", which is the one remaining track in the bunch that has no guitar at all on it. If I didn't think that I have to redo my parts on "Dusty Demonatrix", finishing up the OS guitars would have enabled me to announce that all rhythm guitars are all done, to go along with the finished drums and bass. It is nice to be finally hitting some of these milestones. Crossing things off of the "to do" list is always a good thing.

Then, Darin's gone for about a week, so we'll hopefully be able to get some sessions in somewhere in mid-November. Darin made the sober prediction the other night that he doesn't think we'll be mixing until January, because in his opinion we won't even be done tracking until January. I'll grudgingly concede that this is a distinct possibility, but I'm going to choose for now to hope that we'll be finished tracking in 2006. It would be nice to be able to put up some new rough mixes at MySpace in the coming weeks.

[Yogi]

Just a Quick One while you're away: Saturday I did indeed go to the studio, and we did indeed festoon "Only Shallow" with track upon track of velvety goodness. Tons of guitars, and tons of other things that I don't want to say how we did it 'cuz it will be more fun when you hear the weird noises we made and wonder, "what the heck is that?"

It was fun. Mid-November, please get here soon. I wish to continue working.

[Yogi]

Another day, another perfunctory studio update.

Perfunctory only in that I don't really feel like writing several florid paragraphs talking about the 4 sessions I've spent at Darin's over the last week, unlike in entries past. Just the facts, Ma'am, will have to do for today.

So yes, I've been back in the studio again. Darin and I have worked out a schedule of what we'll be doing from now until Christmas, which actually means, from now until the end of 2006, since we won't be doing any work after the 21st of December. It is my goal to be done tracking before that day. We shall seeeee if we get there.

The last few days have been good ones. I spent a couple of nights in the studio last week - can't remember which ones. I know that I worked on vocals on two of the cover tunes we've recorded, and I finished lead vocals on both of them. They were "In A Simple Rhyme" and "Cinnamon Girl." I think CG is all finished now, and IASR still has a few backing vocals to get done. I wanted to work on the covers because I wanted to feel like we were making some progress, and I thought they'd both be easy to do. For once, I was right!

Saturday it was time to take on the rhythm guitars for The Beast, "Dusty Demonatrix." As exhaustively detailed here previously, we had tried once and failed. This time, failure was not an option.

And it wasn't - though doing two tracks of the Really Heavy Bits all the way through did take up all the time I had available Saturday. It's a difficult song to play, and it was frustrating, but I managed better this time over the last.

Sunday morning I showed up, and we listened to what we did Saturday to make sure we dug it. We did. Next we moved to the several tracks of "supplemental" rhythm guitars that happen at various points in the song. We took some time coming up with various tones and had a whole lot of fun. We finished up about halfway through the day. A new milestone! Rhythm guitars are ALL FINISHED for the album now.

After a meal, we took 30 minutes for a quick overdub on the "10 Print" solo section (trickier than I had expected), and then moved on to some LEAD GUITAR.

Some months hence, when those of you who read this will be actually LISTENING to the stuff I'm talking about, just remember this: the band hasn't been rehearsing regularly lately. I haven't been practicing at all. I haven't even thought about what kind of lead guitar I want to be doing on these songs. I'm very not ready to be recording lead guitar right now.

OH WELL!

We spent the last hours we had last night working on the guitar solo for "Mold On My Soles", and though I was rusty as all get out, and we did about five bazillion takes and punches, we got a good one. So, yay!

I'm back in the studio for three nights this week, and then most of the day Saturday, before we take a week off for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. More updates to follow, of course.

[Yogi]

Three mo' days, three mo' sessions.

And my throat is killing me.

I actually didn't do anything particularly throat-rending over the last three nights until the last 30 minutes of last night's session, where I did the bits on "Dusty Demonatrix" that require a bunch of unhinged screaming.

That hurts. I'm amazed at the metal singers who do it on every song, night after night. I don't understand how that happens.

The last three night's worth of work have been all on vocals. Tuesday was on the singing bits of "Dusty", and then on Wednesday we worked on the lead vocals for "Right Outside." Both nights we finished nearly everything we set out to do, and both of those songs are nearly done in the vocal department. Which makes me very very happy. There's only 4 or 5 songs remaining that need vocals.

One of those we worked on for a while last night, and is called "Our Guarantee." For a song that's only 2 minutes long, it is kicking my ass, I must say. We got some keep-able stuff, I think, but there are something like 14 tracks of vocals on that sucker. After I got to where I thought I couldn't do anything else of note on that song, we switched back to "Dusty" to do the screaming, and now that's done. God. As much as I wish I could do some crazy vocals like Devin Townsend can, I just didn't win the genetic crapshoot in that area like Devin did. Oh well.

Saturday we have a full day of work scheduled, and then that will be it for a week, during which I shall be dog-watching and Thanksgiving Dinner-having. So, more reports on progress will be happening in a week after I write up what we did Saturday.

Fun fact: for Saturday's session, I have rented a vibraphone!

We so crazy.

[Yogi]

It's the holiday week, which also includes a holiday from the studio. That's probably a good thing, Darin was probably getting sick of seeing me so much - even though I know he's champing at the bit to get to the mixing stage of this project. Me too, me toooooo.

Saturday's session was one of the most entertaining I can recall, simply because it was completely out of the ordinary for us: I had rented a vibraphone and had it delivered to the studio. It was in the control room, waiting for me, when I got to DDP's.

I had never actually seen a vibraphone close up before Saturday. I was charmed at how mechanical it is. It basically looks something like a xylophone with long tubes running perpendicular to the floor hanging underneath. There's a motor on it that turns these little paddles inside the tubes, which generates the "vibrato effect", and you can vary the speed of the paddles. There's also a damping pedal attached, which works backwards from the way that piano damping pedals work.

Real vibraphonists use two mallets per hand and can do all kinds of crazy stuff - apparently the guy I rented it from is one of these people, Darin said he played a bunch of flashy stuff after setting up the vibes in the control room.

Me, I just used one mallet per hand, thanks. Luckily, the vibes are laid out sort of like a piano keyboard, which I'm familiar with, so it didn't take too long for me to figure out what notes were what. The main inspiration to use the instrument was that I felt the git-tar sola section of "Moldy" needed a little certain... something in the background. Lizzy and Pete really pulled back the dynamics of the section way down, and I didn't want to obscure what they had done, but I really felt we needed... something.

So I took a flyer and found someone in the area online that would rent me a vibraphone and hoped that it would do the trick.

It did!

Darin and I had so much fun with the thing. We experimented with all sorts of ways of getting different sounds out of the instrument, and we were so jazzed at how it sounded when we listened back to some takes. It took some time for me to get used to playing it, trying to coordinate the damping pedal when I had to, and also just hitting the notes square where I needed to. It didn't matter that I really had no skill, since what we were going for was texture, and I wasn't trying to play anything really difficult.

So we ended up laying down vibes all over the middle section of "Moldy" - the sola, and the bridge that comes after. It sounds hawesome.

We couldn't just stop there, though. I ended up recording short overdubs on "Inscrutable You" and "Sublimeinal" as well. After that, even though we were having all kinds of fun, we decided we'd better back away from the vibraphone, because we didn't want to overuse the coolness factor the instrument provided.

It wasn't exactly cheap to rent the thing, but it was worth every penny.

Then in the afternoon we got a guitar sound for the last thing I needed to record on "Inscrutable You", which is a guitar sola during the "cowboy opera" section. It took a couple of hours of improvising ideas (and enough takes of said "improvising" tends to lead to coming up with specific parts after a while), but now that's done, too.

Darin is still skeptical, but I really think we can be done tracking before Christmas. I choose to be optimistic.

[Yogi]

92%.

That's what my MS Project file that I'm keeping track of album progress in says is the current amount of completed tasks under the "Tracking" category. There's still "Mixing" and "Mastering" to do after that, to be followed by "Manufacturing", of course.

But we are, I am, and Darin is, focused on "Tracking." I always feel that, as long as I can finish "Tracking" before I get hit by a bus, the album can be finished for consumption by someone else. I just want to make it through "Tracking." Please please please.

Anyway, we're at 92% completion.

I've mentioned in other places that last week's rare occurrence of winter weather conditions in Seattle ended up cancelling one of the scheduled sessions we had last week. But I was able to get to the studio Thursday night, and then I was there all day on Saturday and Sunday.

Thursday: completed almost all of the lead vocals on "Handbasket." We may have done something else, but I forget right now.

Saturday: Finally recorded the guitar sola on "Sublimeinal." It's a written part, but it needed to be double-tracked, and that always takes a while. We had some fun with some really tweaked fuzzy guitar sounds, and then we added some orchestration that occurred to us as we worked. By the end, we were both cracking up and hollering, so it went well. Switched to vocals, fixed the last verse of "Sublimeinal" (the part where we had inserted the vibraphone bit), then spent the rest of the afternoon tracking the lead vocals on "Only Shallow." This was tough work, four tracks of doing the exact same thing. My guiding thought was, "I want the vocals on this to sound... plural. Having completed them, I can assure you that they do. While tracking that stuff, Darin and I blissed out more than once on the ungodly fantastic sound and performance that Lizzy laid down. A fantastic bass track.

Sunday: lethargic start, both Darin and I were pooped. But. Work to do. More guitar solas. Started with "Right Outside" which I knew I wanted slathered with very giant delays. On my 2003 demo of the tune I played a million-note-guitar sola; I haven't had time to practice in weeks so I have no chops right when I would need them to do something like that. Also, there's a big difference between the LLL recording of the song and the demo: the solo section is nearly entirely in quarter time: SL-O-O-O-OWWWW MO-O-O-O-TION. Playing a million notes in that context would sound retarded. So, I we slapped on a delay and I played long, slow, whole notes everywhere. I didn't feel creative in a lead-guitar-kinda way all day Sunday, so I responded to every suggestion co-producer Darin made. As I played conservative and "tasteful" take after take, he reminded me that I could stick in some of the "rock star" stuff that I pull out all the time when I'm noodling, but never, ever do when I'm recording or playing live. So in one section I did some EVH-style tap harmonics. They sound cool, but remain subtle. Most people will never know I did anything that shockingly "guitar-hero-ish." So we got that solo done, but it has lots of cool bends and things that hurt to play, so now my fingers hurt.

Too bad, Big Baby. More solas on the menu.

Now it's "Handbasket" solo time. I had no clue what to play on it. I threw a solo down on the demo I made of it, but mixed it really quietly when I gave a copy to Pete n' Lizzy, cuz it really sucked hard. I have never played a solo there when we rehearsed the song, cuz the solo has a rhythm guitar part going on that I needed to practice. So.

OK, I did have ONE idea. I thought I'd play the chorus vocal melody, all "Smells Like Teen Spirit"-style. The solo section is similar to the chorus section, but not exactly the same, so I thought the chorus melody might work, and it's something I've never done on a solo before, so why not?

So I sat there and fumbled around, trying to figure out what the melody was, while Darin ran around changing mics and amps and fuzz boxes and preamps, and all that other stuff that he does, that I don't ever pay attention to. Darin described the way we work to someone else the other day, and it's exactly on point: when I'm in the studio with Darin these days, I let him worry about getting whatever the tone is, I just worry about playing my parts right. I'm not the guy who has to mix all this stuff and make it sound good. I let him know if something he's got dialed up bugs me, but generally, I don't care. I don't care what amp we're using. I don't care what guitar I'm playing. I don't care, I don't care, I don't care. I say: "Dude, it needs to be the biggest monster sound EVER," and then Darin goes out and makes it happen. If it works out that we end up using the tiniest amp in his place to get the snarliest guitar sound, GOOD. I don't even need to know. All I want to do is listen to what is coming out of the speakers, and LIKE it.

Man, I am a different guy than the one who made Any Raw Flesh? Which is good, cuz this new album is going to kick ARF in the pants.

So anyway - I started playing the melody for the chorus, and DDP and I both agree that it will work. DDP gets animated; it is obvious he has many ideas in his mind. I make the decision to surrender myself completely to whatever those ideas might be. He tells me what he thinks we should do - I agree every time. He sings parts, I learn them and play them as quickly as I can, with no argument. It turns out really great. There is an awful lot of stuff in there on that "Handbasket" sola, I sure am glad I don't have to mix it. And honestly, except for my initial "Teen Spirit" germ, and the fact that I played it, that solo is really Darin's solo. You guys shoulda seen him, he was conducting it, like a... um, well, like a conductor.

But now my fingahs really hurt. Time for vocals.

We return to "Only Shallow", where I need to add ONE more track to the previously done FOUR, only this time singing everything one octave LOWER. We get it done. Then there's a harmony for the very end, the BIG FREAKIN' CLIMAX. It's right at the top of my range. I make many valiant attempts, wearing myself out, cuz it's too hard to sing if you're me. I give up. Hopefully our friend Liz Aday, who's going to come in and do lots of cameo vocals in a few days, can manage it. I really like the part, I just can't get there.

So. 92%. Two days off, I'm back in there on Wednesday, Thursday, and then all day Saturday, before we're off for a week again.

[Yogi]

96%.

The closer we get to being done, the smaller the increments in the "completed tracking" percentage seem to increase from session to session. Urgh.

Since I last wrote, three more sessions have taken place. I'm actually kinda fuzzy on what we did last week - I know it was all singing stuff. I'm pretty sure that we finished up most of the vocals on "Our Guarantee" in there somewhere Wednesday and Thursday, though we don't TOTALLY finish them off until early on Saturday. But they are finished now.

I know on Thursday I took a crack at starting the vocals on "Numbered Days", the song Lizzy correctly predicted we would do vocals on last. That's because we've recorded (but not released) this tune before. It's the last track that I hadn't done anything on yet, so... it was time.

Man, I wish I could remember better what we did Wed-Thurs... I know I was really tired through the week, so that might have something to do with it, and something also to do with the fact that I sucked so hard on my "Numbered Days" attempt. Fact is, ND is a really hard song for me to sing in the state it's been in over the last few years, and I'm coming at this version with a mind to try and find a way to change it without destroying what's good about it, so at least I'd be able to be more confident/comfortable when performing it. We didn't end up getting anything on ND that I could keep. So that will have to wait until next week's sessions. Oh, goody.

Saturday was a big day on the schedule, because we had a person new to our particular insanity coming in: Lizzy's buddy, Liz Aday. I've known of Liz for a long time, she plays in the local Top 40 scene that I played in around here back in '96-98, and we've played with a bunch of the same musicians. Lizzy (and I think Pete, too) has played with her in various projects, and Lizzy has always had very positive things to say about her. We had a sizable "short list" of little "spot vocal overdubs" that we felt would be best served by a female singer, and so I asked Lizzy to ask Liz (I know, the plural Lizzes gets confusing) if she could come in for a day.

Saturday was the day. While we waited for everybody else to arrive Darin and I recorded my last little bit of backup vocals on "In A Simple Rhyme", and then started in on the ending vocal extravaganza on "Right Outside." We got a good chunk of that done before the two Lizzes and Pete arrived. Quickly we decided to call Lizzy "LD" and Liz "LA" so that the appropriate Liz would know who was being talked at.

Now, LA hadn't heard one note of what we were doing before she arrived. I was really interested in seeing what would happen when we just sprang stuff on her, which turned out to be a good strategy because she likes to be spontaneous and just go for it. She seemed a little worried that her voice wasn't in the best condition (a late-night karaoke excursion the previous evening had left her a tad scratchy), but she was still game for whatever we had in mind.

Since I figured it wouldn't be easy to be "the stranger" in the situation, I thought the first thing we should record would be something that would hopefully disarm any sense that we weren't all there to have fun, and that would show that while we were there to do work, we do have a sense of humor. Besides LA, there were things I needed from Pete and LD as well.

So, Pete and I walked out in the control room and laid down, in one take, the "bed" track that will serve as the basis from which several "between song interludes" will be created. I don't want to get too descriptive, because you'll just have to hear it, but there is a method to the madness here. Basically, we stood there and... vocalized for a solid minute without stopping, making the most ridiculous racket you can possibly imagine, before we eventually dissolved into laughter. Ah, the things we do for art. Luckily, we got enough of what was needed that another take wasn't necessary. I don't think we could have done another.

You'll know it when you hear it.

I can't even begin to imagine what it must have been like to be LA and have that be the first thing coming out of the speakers at her. When she was still in the control room (rather than say, running screaming) when we came in for playback, I took that as a good sign.

We moved to "Fair Use", which has an ending with a big "gang vocal" thing, that I wanted to make sound like "we 'uz all in chuuuuuuch." It's a pretty soulful part for a white guy like me, and I wanted us all out there, clapping and singing the melody together. Liz is really good at the sort of soulful improv stuff that singers in that genre do, and she picked up the vibe instantly.

We did a bunch of tracks of us doing this, and then one more track with LA right up on the mic, the rest of us in the back of the room, designed to let LA improvise - she did one take of that, and it was perfect (I nearly ruined the take at the beginning by clapping on the wrong beat -- I am so white). Anyway. It sounds great. Next!

Switched gears to "10 Print". Then "Inscrutable You." LA learned the little bizarro things I wanted her to do shockingly quickly, and then just nailed the parts. She added things that I wouldn't have thought of creatively. In every case, she exceeded what I hoped for. We wuz cookin'.

We took a break for eats.

Came back, did some more group silliness on "Sublimeinal." Added some more to the "interlude" track that Pete and I started on previously.

Next we got to the harmony bit on "Only Shallow" that I wrote about in a previous entry. LA had some trouble with this, the only thing in the whole session where it just wasn't really happening. It's no big thang, but I think LA was a little disappointed that she wasn't able to blaze through this one as easily. We hacked away at it for a while, but then gave up. We then moved on to "Dusty Demonatrix."

I had DDP set up a mic for me as well, figuring LA and I would track what needed doing together. This is for the end of the tune, on great big weird ride-out in 9/8 time. We needed to sing the notes of a great big raucous A7 chord that hits on the turnaround of the riff, that as the song continues gets more and more out of control. After that, I wanted to dissolve into... well, whatever happened. This song is bleak, and dark.

We put down a whole slew of tracks, both of us dissolving into improv of... well, something that sounds kind of like Muzak For The End Of The World.

When we were done, LA said if she could do that more often, she wouldn't need to go to therapy.

And LA was done! PnL took her home, and DDP and I hung out and finished up some more stuff - I added some missing "character voices" to "Our Guarantee", and then we finished up the end stuff on "Right Outside."

A stunningly productive day. It's always a trip to bring an "outsider" into our little insulated Half Zaftig world - we got the same vibe 18 months ago when Charlie Drown recorded her cameo on "Inscrutable You." Sonically, having another voice in the mix really gives a different vibe to the proceedings. Those of you who know the old stuff, be prepared for... well, something pretty different. But... not? I dunno. This record is ALL over the place. There's huge heavy stuff. There's funky stuff (something that never would have happened without PnL). There is total smooth 70's soul mixed with Sesame Street. There is absurdist Spaghetti-Western Opera Man.

I don't know WHAT we're thinking, but it sure sounds good to me.

So. 96%. Three sessions scheduled for next week, Lizzy and Pete will most definitely be finished with everything after that. I am sadly doubting that the three sessions will be enough to get all my parts finished though, which means I think we're going to just miss my goal of getting the tracking done in 2006. But I think all we'll need in January before mixing is one, two more sessions, tops.

Hey, go say hi to Liz Aday over HERE at her MySpace page.

See y'all next week.

[Yogi]

Well, I didn't notice that I'd posted an update at MySpace that didn't get duplicated here until today. This is from December 21, 2006:

=======================

Well, yesterday was the last recording session of 2006, and now my "Progress Spreadsheet" for the new album says we are 99% finished with tracking.

Dang it, didn't finish it. I was really hoping we would.

However, we are ALMOST, ALMOST done. All the lead vocals are now finished (which is a gigantic relief for yours truly). All that's left is some touchups on backing vocals on a couple of things, and then a guitar sola, and then some "textural" guitar overdubs on a few other things.

And then we're DONE with the tracking. Two, three more sessions, MAX. Life Like Luster WILL see the light of day in 2007. I can guarantee you that much. For those of you still paying attention, I am so very grateful for your patience. Can't wait for y'all to hear this stuff!

[Yogi]

TRACKING IS FINISHED.

Life Like Luster is now "in the can." "Wrapped" to use film parlance. Keeping with the film lingo, we now move to "post" to finish up this thing.

Yesterday we spent our last full day of getting all the remaining bits finished up. I sang that high harmony on "Only Shallow" finally (which you won't get to hear anytime soon anyway since it's not going to make this album). I finished up the missing "Handbasket" vocals. I played a delightfully ridiculous guitar solo on "10 PRINT." I added a little bit of slide guitar and an organ flourish on "Fair Use." We added a textural guitar overdub on the ending of "Numbered Days."

And the very last thing? Another instance of "counting the ways" on "Dusty Demonatrix" (you'll know it when you hear it).

And that's it. No more sessions. Of course, I'm sure we'll take a month or more to mix the 12 songs that have made the final cut. If we can get going on the artwork, it looks to me like the release will likely be late-April, possibly May. So there's still a lot of time left. We'll try and keep the content at MySpace fresh and interesting for you in the meantime.

I have some other ideas - I'm gonna corral my bandmates over here one day and we'll record a "podcast" talking about the album and what we think of it, funny stories about making it, all loaded with clips galore from the songs.

We get our first press review this week from The Stranger. They are reviewing the rough mixes.

Since this is a "recording diary" I don't know that I'll be updating it much more, I guess if anything interesting happens at the mixing or mastering sessions I'll type up some words and add them on. But at last we're hitting the end stretch of this project. Hard to believe I've been posting here about it for nearly 2 years - it will be over two years since we started when this thing is finally done. Lots of blood, sweat, and squirrel tubes between now and then.

It was fun. But I am sure glad to be almost finished.