Saturday Jan 23rd, 2010.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. With a full day of recording ahead of us, we chose Nick’s on North Spring Street. Todd, S Foye and I go over the incidentals of the upcoming session as well as the surprising fact that Florida is chalk full of bald eagles and jaguars.
After we head over to Bedrock Studios in Echo Park where KamranV, who runs Spaceland Recordings, has just opened a brand new recording space and Summer Darling is to be the inaugural session. The best part: it’s all for charity! Bedrock has donated the room and their gear to us for the day so that we can track “Mexican Food,” our song for the upcoming 826LA Benefit Compilation, proving that we too, are not above some charity from time to time.
The room is spacious with a Moroccan flair, reminding us of NRG in the valley. All sorts of toys are ours to use and abuse along with very expensive mics and pres and an HD Pro Tools rig. Todd picks out a DW drumkit while I fool around with my new distortion pedal, the Holy Fire by Creation Audio Labs. It takes a while to debug the system, but Kamran, S Foye, and Tim, the assistant engineer, take it all in stride. The biggest challenge stems from the fact that there stands a gi-normous radio tower pumping Echo Park and Silver Lake with Christian Mexican Radio across the street from Bedrock. So occasionally the amps, guitars, pedals, or mics pick up the signal, proliferating some Dios y Jesus all over the track.
Once we sort through these types of issues, Todd is ready to track. We had done the scratch vocals and guitar to a click track the day before. Upon hearing it in his headphones and playing along, Todd felt the first half of the song was too slow. We bumped the section up about 15BPM and left the back section at the original tempo. Because of the song’s structure, the ploy works remarkably well. With a few minor overdubs, Todd finishes and I head in to do my part. Playing out of my own rig (63 Fender Bandmaster, Wren And Cuff Fuck Off Boost Pedal, and the Holy Fire pedal), the recording goes smoothly enough, and the torch is passed to Dan.
Dan plays through a 15 watt Gibson Les Paul Junior, but soon discards it as the tone isn’t what he was looking for. He fools around with a solid state Fender Twin before ultimately deciding on a Fender Tone Master head and a 4 X 10 Marshal cabinet. Meanwhile Heather has been fooling around with an Ampeg flip top tube bass amp. Originally we think the tone sounds like garbage because of the amp, before realizing, nope, it’s our janky ass bass guitar that was shitting out sour tone. Kamran raids the vaults of his studio and returns with a Gibson Thunderbird bass, which we throw straight through S Foye’s tube preamp. Both Dan and Heather’s parts combine to give the song serious balls. We ran out of time to do vocals, since we had to get to our show in Long Beach at the Basement.
The Basement is real cool club. We’d never played there, but it has a decent sound system headed up by Brian Smith, the ubiquitous Long Beach sound man. Swear to god, this guys has done sound at nearly every one of our recent Long Beach shows no matter where we’ve played. The gig went swimmingly, we were surrounded by friends and well-wishers, the DJ was actually playing awesome music in between songs, and there was plenty of laughter. Heather and I spent our three am drive home from the show reflecting on how much we love our life. The feeling after a good show is one of triumphant euphoria and easily outweighs the feeling after a bad show. The trick is to remember that fact when you’ve just played a bad show, but it’s a trick I’m starting to get better at!
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