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FOR MUSICIANS ONLYCapturing the Hurricane -- The Sessionsby George Ziemann -- November 16, 2008 Amado, AZ -- Despite all my preparation and planning, I still forgot to bring the snake. I had enough mic cables so this wasn't a major problem. I'm going to blame Carl for this one, plus my array of medications, some of which may cause drowsiness. The day before I came he asked me to bring lights. So I had to dig those out the day I left (Friday -- Nov. 14) and find the gels to go with them. Amazingly, gas was only $2.25 a gallon when I filled up. Last month it was $3.50. That was a good sign. So my plan for Friday was to get here get the stuff inside and try to assess the situation, their plans, what they wanted to do, etc. What they wanted to do was start recording. So I set stuff up for an acoustic session with Carl and Cara. At one point, Tim popped in did a couple of tunes and then Carl and Cara did a couple more. We did 9 songs total. On Saturday, we packed up the gear, moved it a block over to Tim's, where the band set-up is located. Did that at about 3 p.m., placed microphones and ran all the inputs I needed. We came back at 5 to record. Everyone was on time, they were rehearsed, and we went through 9 songs, with only a couple of second takes. Just the rhythm tracks. No leads, no vocals. We were done by 7. Then we packed up my primary gear and took it back to Carl's, where I pulled in the drum tracks from the ADAT and got started on rough mixes. Worked on them for several hours that night and a few hours in the morning. Then I did a session with Carl's dad, Don Hayden, who ran through some old, old tunes, with some accompaniment from Carl, who had to learn more than one of the songs during the process. Another 8 songs. He's got this great, deep voice and that batch is going to be really interesting to orchestrate. A couple of hours later, Tim's mom, Betty Jones came over to record some hymns with Tim. She, too, had a great voice. Good pitch, good control. Another 7 songs. There was a short break and I pulled some video footage in that Cara had been taking during the day, which will come in handy later. I also took some video during the set-up and have yet to see that. The rest of the day was spent doing a rough mix, getting the songs into good enough shape to do the lead guitar and vocal tracks tomorrow. I haven't let anyone listen to any of it yet, but after spending the rest of the day on them, the songs are ready for the follow-up session. Okay, that was a condensed version of the weekend, more for my reference than anything else. I'll come back and expand on the various parts of the story so far, once they're finished happening. But that's where we're at so far. 2 and 1/2 days; 33 songs. November 18 -- Monday was back to Tim's for vocal and guitar overdubs. We spent five hours, and got almost all of the overdubs done. On the last song, Carl's voice was shot. So we went back to Carl's, did an evaluation of all the songs, pulled in some more video. In addition to the song he wanted to re-do, Carl noticed a couple where he wanted to put in a harmony that was overlooked earlier. On Tuesday morning, we took about 20 minutes and finished that off. So now I'm back home with a ton of new content to work through. Caught an immense amount of material in 4 days. There was a point Sunday afternoon where I was feeling overwhelmed by it, in addition to the fact that everyone was tossing a dozen ideas in the air. Carl's brother, John (from Hayden's Wall) stopped over to let us know that we sucked and were doing it wrong. This was exactly what we invited him for, lest anyone think they had just done something great. Of course, he was listening to raw rhythm tracks, which did kinda suck because I hadn't done any production on them yet. But it was good to see him again. It's been a while. What I found particularly noteworthy about the entire trip was that everyone I recorded was extremely well-rehearsed. It was almost a week of one-take wonders. I caused more second takes and false starts than anyone else. I can only think of about three or four instances where someone wanted a second take on anything. All of my customers seemed happy. Everything was relaxed, except for moving my studio-in-a-box way too damn many times, which sends me into a serious anal-retentive obsessive compulsive mode. Gotta go through the complete checklist every single time, even though we were only moving a block every time. That's the sequence of events, but so far it hasn't been terribly informative. I took a lot of notes and part of the purpose of the video was to get still photos of mic placement and things like that. Now that it's over, let's go back to the beginning and re-examine each stage of the process in detail. Day 1 -- Friday, Nov. 14 -- Spontaneous CreativityDay 2 -- Saturday, Nov. 15 -- Rhythm TracksDay 3 -- Sunday, Nov. 16 -- Don and Betty
Day 4 -- Monday, Nov. 16 -- Vocals and LeadsMixdownPart
One -- Initial compression, Drum
EQ, Submixes
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