FOR MUSICIANS ONLY Hurricane Sessions - Day Four Vocals and Guitar Leads Monday, November 16, 2008 -- By late Monday morning, I had managed to go through the rhythm tracks and at least get enough of a mix together to do vocal and lead tracks. By this time, I am already feeling overwhelmed by the amount of content I have collected during this trip. The one-take approach that has been going on all weekend has been a little stressful just because it hasn't left a lot of room for error and I never really listened to anything back enough to tell if anything had a problem. No chance to do that until after the fact. So that high efficiency approach carries the risk of one serious mistake carrying through every song. Between the second and third song, on Saturday we had messed with a couple of mics, which somehow ended up having their channels swapped, but that was the worst that had happened. Otherwise, everything was where it was supposed to be, no tracks were distorted. With minimal effort, they were sounding relatively good and certainly beefy enough to feel good doing the singing or leads. The Nady drum mics had excellent rejection of any off-axis sounds. So even though everything was in the same room, the separation of the drums was excellent. There is a little bleed of guitar and bass into some of the drum tracks (overheads mostly), but there are no noticeable occurances of the drums leaking into the guitar mics, which are the only tracks that they could possible get into. Tim made sure there were tables and chairs today, although I only needed my computer and the Digi001. Manny showed up before we got started. He didn't have any tracks to do, but he lives right around the corner Today's plan is to hang the AKG vocal mic in the middle of the room, which is going to work even better here than it did at Carl's house. Added bonus is that both Tim and Carl are going to be very consistent about staying the proper distance from it. Tim wanted to do his tracks first. Naturally, the first vocal take was ruined by me. Tim sang the entire song, then said, "Man, there is something seriously wrong with the timing." I forgot to turn on low latency monitoring. And on one song, Tim said he could do it better. Other than that, it was another night of first takes. It still took much longer than Saturday, because we went through every song at least 3 or 4 times, adding another harmony or lead track. There were even a couple where Tim had played the 12-string on Saturday that he went back and added the bass track to, this time plugged directly into ProTools. All the additional tracks were done one at a time. and there's really not a lot to tell. They knew what they wanted to do. They did it. Carl would come to a spot where he didn't want to sing the last couple of songs because he was starting to trash his voice. As a result, there would be one last session at Carl's house on Tuesday morning where he took care of those tunes and few harmonies here and there. Since all of our photos are video stills, they've got this slightly out of focus paparazzi style going which I'm going to have to embrace. I certainly didn't have time to take any photos. If there hadn't been a video camera around, we wouldn't have any photos at all. Manny took most of these shots. No one took any video of Tim, though, mostly because he came in, did his parts and disappeared again before Manny picked up the camera. His amp was inside the shed but it was a real nice early evening, so Carl opted to close the door and play his guitar tracks outside. He used headphones to monitor the playback.