Friday, April 13th

We started out by working on some vocals today. A couple of days ago we just did one or two vocal takes on all of the songs as a starting point. Today, I wanted to go through all of the low-range vocal parts and re-record any dodgy bits. The reason I wanted to do this is because some of the hardest vocals to sing are in the low-range as it's tougher to get power and stay on pitch when you're not pushing as much air out of your lungs.

Coop and I were both pleasantly surprised with how little tweaking we had to do and after just a couple of hours, we had all of the low-range vocals taken care of! After that, we decided to hit up the final 3 songs that are still missing lead guitar...

The first one, "Glorified", has about 5 different lead guitar parts. the first one is a haunting eBow part that's easily one of my favorite musical sections of the album. The song also has this massive instrumental part where I just went nuts with some awesome octave solo-ing. One of my main goals is to convey passion in the recordings, so I'm constantly reminding myself to not play it safe. On lead guitar, it means living with some imperfections so that the album doesn't sound robotic, sterile and over produced. I think we're hitting it right on the head.

"You're Beautiful" has a massive crescendo at the end but I'm going to let some synthesizers carry that over simple rhythm guitars. The final song, "Unchanging" is simple and very acoustic in it's sound. The only lead guitar pops up in a chilled-out instrumental part. It's a little Stevie Ray, blues-y riff that isn't that hard to play but has to sound a little "dirty" in order to work properly - it's basically the guitar equivalent of spending an hour on your hair to get the coveted "bed head" look...

Lead guitars - done!

Tomorrow we'll track more lead vocals until I'm horse, then work on piano, strings and synthesizers. I've been on a massive Killers bender for the last month and I'm completely in love with the way they've made 80's synth cool again. If you think I sound crazy, just listen to the way their latest album, "Sam's Town" starts and you'll instantly get what I'm talking about. Anyway - that's the kind of sound I'm talking about when I mention "synthesizers" (In case you were wondering).