Man, do I love recording. As frustrating as it can get sometimes, there's something about going into a studio and getting your ideas down on tape (yeah, I know it's not tape anymore). So we spent Saturday night at Dave's house and started by recording the drums and bass. Dave and Jereb pretty much nailed it in just a couple of takes. Then it was time for guitars. Josh took care of business with the 6 string, 12-string, and banjo. Next, I came along with the mandolin and whistles. The mandolin went just fine, but being a relatively new whistle player, I was struggling big-time on the reels. It wasn't the notes that were the problem as much as the breath control, which I'm still learning. So we decided to give me a night to sleep on it and packed everything up and headed over to Dan's house to record the vocal tracks at about 9:30 pm. Now I only recently met Dan, he plays in Dave's other band- called Monody. But he has just been awesome to work with. Fun to hang out with and a real pro with the technical aspects of recording. We got the vocals recorded pretty quickly, I'll admit to being a little surprised, but I guess it was only 2 songs. So around 11:30 I headed home- we were coming back the next afternoon to record fiddle and (hopefully) whistle.
That was the worst drive home. I was heading back to Scappoose from Hillsboro, so I was going the usual route over Cornelius Pass road. Unbeknownst to me, it had rained a little that evening and the road had turned into a sheet of ice. There were cops posted at various locations on CP, letting people know they couldn't use it. They suggested I head back into Portland and go out HWY 30 (my usual route home from work). But I knew better. I often take Skyline and other back roads home from there because it's kind of fun and there's never any traffic, so I decided to take that route home. Besides, there was no snow or ice where I was, so it couldn't be that bad. Well, by the time I got to the top of Skyline there was about 3 inches of snow/ice on the road and I was driving about 10 mph. Then I hit Logie Trail to get down to HWY 30, which is 4 miles of extreme twists and turns, all downhill. So like I said, it was a bad drive home. What should've been a half hour drive ended up taking an hour and a half plus. At least I'm still here.
So last night we went back to Dan's to finish the recording and since Josh & Tatijanna were running a little late (he had to replace his alternator, yuk), I had a chance to revisit my whistle parts. This time it went much better! In fact, I even added some low whistle to the fiddle tunes. They wont be real prominent in the mix, but they'll give it a little more depth. Then Tatijanna showed up and nailed her fiddle parts. I had warned her that Dave & Jereb had recorded the fiddle tunes faster than we had ever played them, but she got it done pretty darn quickly. Must be her classical training. We were able to spend an hour to 2 working on mixing, and the songs are starting to take shape! Although this is just going to be a demo, our goal is to start recording our album very soon, so we're hoping we can use a lot of these takes for that. We'll be heading back to Dan's next weekend for (hopefully) the final mixing, then we'll post the songs on the website for you to hear. They're a lot more rocking than what's here now.
In other news, we added another show at the Geezer Gallery in Multnomah Village. Our friend Andrea Burnett will be displaying some of her art that evening and she asked us to play during the show. Sweet!
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