Recording Update

Hello everyone!

I'm sorry, I've been somewhat absent for the last long while in the online world. There are a bunch of people who have sent me emails to which I have yet to respond, and some of them are quite old. Yikes. I WILL get to them, but wow I've been busy lately.

Anyway, on to more recent things. I thought you might all be interested to hear a little bit about how the recording process is going. In order to properly explain that though, I should probably give you a bit of a run down as to how recording an album works (or at least, one way it can work). At any rate, this is the way we're doing it!

The first thing is commonly referred to as "pre-production". For anyone who has ever wondered at exactly what a producer's job is, he or she is basically a sort of project director. You explain to the producer what it is that you want, and he/she tries (okay, the pronoun thing here is going to get annoying fast, so I'm just going to go with "he" since our producer this time was a guy) his best to help you achieve the sound you want. This can involve a wide variety of suggested alterations to the way you might normally play a song. Things like the arrangement ("I feel like that one section's too long, something needs to happen there"), the instrumentation ("I'm not sure the Telecaster guitar is working in this song, maybe try the Les Paul"), and even down to the physical playing of the instrument ("can you hit the hi hat lighter, and the snare drum harder?"). The producer's job can be a tricky one, and requires a great deal of experience in the business. A good producer will be able to keep in mind what sounds are going to be fighting for sonic space with other sounds in the same song (for a random example, the fiddle and the vocals), and do his best to keep that from happening any more than absolutely necessary. That doesn't mean those things can't happen at the same time, just that they have to be recorded in such as way as to not interfere with one another.

How does all of that tie in to "pre-production"? Having conversations about the kinds of things listed above can often be somewhat time consuming as everyone voices their respective opinions about what should or shouldn't happen in a given song. That's precisely the kind of time you don't want to be paying big dollars to waste in the studio. (Studio time charges be the hour, not by the song). Pre-production usually takes place at some fairly cheap location (it could happen at someone's house if any of us had a suitable place for playing loud rock music all day), and basically just means that the band and producer get together and play through all the material, make any changes that people want made, and basically get everything solidified and ready to go for the studio, so that you can get in and out in an efficient manner and not pay to waste time talking about things that could have been resolved earlier.

Okay, so that's pre-production. As Brian mentioned in his last blog, we did the pre-production part of this up-coming album near the small Ontario town of Picton, which is north-east of Toronto. We rented a cottage, set up all the gear in the living room, and basically lived this up-coming album inside and out for a week. At this point, we also recorded some very rough "demos" so that we could listen back to the tunes and have a easier time making decisions about what is and what is not working. That done, it was time to move on to recording the "bed tracks".

I assume the name comes from the same place as a term like "bed rock", but basically we're talking here about the first few instruments to be recorded, which are generally the rhythm section instruments, or if you like, the foundation upon which the rest of the album is to be built. As you may or may not be aware, recording in the studio is not like recording live. In a live situation, there's a show going on, and people expect to see the kind of show their used to seeing, a few added rules for behavior aside. You mic everything up as best you can, and try to get the various instruments isolated from one another to whatever degree possible, but you take what you get, and try to make it sound as good as it can. In a recording studio, there's no need to take such chances. Instruments are carefully isolated from one another. This is to keep the sound of one person's performance from "bleeding" into the mics of another's. Say, for example, trying to keep the sound of the guitar amp out of the drum mics, or the drums out of the vocals, etc. This is generally not possible live, but it's easy in the studio. Your average recording studio will have a variety of rooms with big Plexiglas windows so that people can see one another, but still be sonically isolated. In fact, when guitars are recorded, the player is generally not in the same room as the amp!

Another big difference between the studio and a live setting is that the instruments aren't all recorded at once. Different instruments sound their best in different spaces for one thing, but it's also exceedingly difficult to capture a perfect take from everyone all at once. It's hard enough just to get a perfect take out of one person! Speaking for myself, to this day I don't think I've ever played one. For the first five days (in our case; the time may vary from one album to another), our main focus was on getting the drums, bass, and as much guitar as possible recorded and done with. Now it would be kind of weird to just have Mark, Trevor and me record our parts without the other guys there. Especially in this case where the tunes are all quite new, and maybe everyone isn't 100% solid on exactly what happens where without a little bit of a cue from some of the lead instruments or vocals. For this reason, other instruments/vocals which are important for cues (generally most if not all of the other things going on in the tune) play along, even though we have no intention of keeping, say, the lead vocal take. (These are called "scratch tracks", and they serve only as a guide for the other instruments, and are intended to be disposed of). The nice things is that once the lead vocal is recorded, we just keep that performance, and play it back over future takes of the song, so no matter how many cracks we take at a tune the singer only has to sing the song once. Remember, it doesn't matter if the performance is flawless, because we're not keeping the scratch tracks beyond using them to record the bed tracks anyway. Generally, we run anywhere from about 5 to about 10 takes of a tune before we figure we got enough stuff that everyone played everything right at least somewhere. Once everyone is in agreement about that, we move on to the next tune.

On this album, we're doing something a little bit different. This paragraph will be a little more technical, for those who are interested. Technology is such these days that recording can be done entirely to a computer program called "Pro-Tools". The days of producers and engineers editing big strips of reel to reel tape by making cuts with razor blades are gone and buried. Both of our last albums were done entirely on Pro-Tools. There is however a school of thought out there that there was a quality to the sound of recording to tape which is lost by recording straight to computer. The difference is very subtle; so subtle in fact that I have a hard time picking out the differences when played examples of tape and computer vs. computer only. The difference is however something our producer Tim Abraham (Mark's brother, by the way) felt was very worth while. What this means is that we're recording straight to tape, but then turning around and dumping that recording into the computer. The computer program makes it very easy to manipulate recordings in exactly the way you want, but by doing it this way you get the ease of the computer while still preserving some of that "tape sound". The only annoyance is that this "dumping" has to be done in real time, meaning that if we just did eight takes of a tune and have decided that we've got enough, we then have to sit around and wait while all of those takes are played back off of the tape into the computer. (It's fortunate that the studio had a pool table!) I should also mention that on Casualties of Retail, tape did play a minor role. All the songs except for Congress, after being recorded into the computer, were then dumped onto tape, and then back into the computer. This was again to try to "warm up" the sound of the recording, a phenomenon for which tape is generally known.

During these "dumping" sessions mentioned above, while some of us could relax, Trevor was still hard at work. Since the tune was being played back in real time, why not take that time to record some more guitar? So Trevor would sit back out in his booth and record all his parts again. This meant that every time Mark or I did a take of a song, Trevor did two. Not that he didn't get his parts right the first time, but it's generally considered desirable to thicken up the sound of electric guitars by recording them twice.

This is the point we have reached now. We have completed the bed tracks (which again is to say that we've finished recording the bass, drums, and most of the guitar). All the other instruments, as well as some extra guitar "over-dubs" are yet to be done. All the scratch tracks which were recorded in the bed tracking process will be replaced with good takes, and a number of things which we didn't bother to record at all in the first part of the process have yet to be added in. This will be done in a different studio; Tim's studio "The Hive" in Toronto, to be precise. The bed tracks for this album were recorded at a studio in Mississauga, Ontario called "Metalworks". The reasons for doing different things at different studios is largely the fault of the drums. Drums sound their best in a fairly large room where the mics can pick up some of the room's natural reverb. It's also easy in a big studio to have the space you need for everyone to play all at once so the bed tracks are easier to record. Most of the rest of the album will be recorded piecemeal in a room about the size of a giant walk in closet, which is all that's needed.

Any day now, we will begin a process known as "comping" which I assume is short for "compiling", although if I'm mistaken hopefully someone will correct me. Remember I said that we did a whole bunch of takes of each song, and stopped only when we felt we had done everything right at least somewhere? Well, comping is the part where you go through and pick and choose which parts of which takes to keep. Then you can cut and paste the best parts together and get what essentially amounts to your single best possible take. This is my least favourite part of the recording process. I find it incredibly tedious to have to sit and listen with great attention to the little details that change from one take to another and try to decide what should go where. It's an important process, and worth putting the time into, but it's not something I consider "fun".
There's another aspect to the process which always gnaws at me while comping. My least favourite aspect of recording is what I find to be the "dishonesty" of it all. Yes, I played those parts, but I didn't play them all that perfectly in any one single take. Not only that, but little things are often changed within a take. "Oops, I rushed that bass drum hit a little tiny bit, let's use the computer to fix it". The dilemma is this: if we were to keep recording takes until I finally played one that was honestly and truly perfect, we'd probably still be in the studio right now working on that first tune. In this day and age of the music industry, people are used to hearing a certain degree of perfection from recordings in areas such as time and pitch. Let me be clear: I don't want it to be less than perfect. I just feel somehow like a cheater or a liar or something by fixing all my little mistakes with a computer and then putting the finished product forward to the world as if I really played it that way. Admittedly, I almost did. And Tim will try to change as little as possible. But it's that "almost" that gets to me. I know that this is the way things are done throughout the music recording industry, and has been for a long time, so I'm not doing anything that everyone else isn't also doing, but I guess maybe putting this up here for everyone to read makes me feel like at least I'm not a liar! You know what you're getting! The bottom line that I have to get my head around I suppose is that performing live and recording in the studio are two different animals, and can't be thought of as the same thing.

As for the rest of the project, from this point forth instruments will be recorded one at a time in sonic conditions that are (hopefully) ideal to each instrument. I don't know what the order of instruments will be, nor am I sure if that will really matter for any or every given tune. We'll keep adding layers until we've got the finished song the way we want it to sound.

I think I won't say too much more about the rest of the project at this point, but instead I'll let someone who's actually involved tell you more about what that's like. I just thought you might like to know where we're at now. Look for another update (probably by someone else) soon!