Saturday, April 7th

Into the studio at 10am this morning for a full 6 hours of recording - that's pretty much as much as we can take before we become so tired, we stop caring! Recording actually requires a huge amount of focus to both play the music and then listen intently to what you've just recorded.

We finished up all of the acoustic rhythm parts on my Martin D16, which Coop has sounding incredible. He's running 2 condenser mics and a direct line out from the guitar, so we get 3 different acoustic tracks every time I lay down a part. The end result is 3 options for each "take". We can also blend 2, or all 3, together for a really full sound. My dream acoustic guitar sound can be found on the Shane & Shane album, "Clean". It's one of the best recorded albums I've ever heard with no fancy effects, just incredibly "true" recording and mixing. 'Worth checking out...

Anyway, 2 of the last acoustic tracks were "Glorified" and "Worthy of the Call", which both feature a lot of guitar picking. I managed to get through them pretty quick and I'm real pleased with the results. We still may end up dropping some of those recorded parts in favor of a some piano parts but we record everything we can think of so that we have tons of options when it comes time to mix the album.

After finishing up the acoustic tracks, we moved on to the electric guitar rhythm parts. It gets more and more fun to record as we go along because I'm able to play along with more recorded tracks on each song. I'm already playing along with drums, bass, acoustic guitar and my out-of-tune "scratch" vocal (that's what happens when you're trying to save your voice for Sunday).

I'm using my '99 Fender Telecaster Deluxe for the electric rhythm parts. It has a killer "dirty" sound to it and is the best rhythm electric guitar I've ever played. Today we're running it into my Mesa Boogie Nomad 55 (direct) and Fender Custom Vibrolux Reverb (via a Line6 DM4 pedal) amps (click the underlined words for product info links). Here's where it gets crazy technical...

Not only that but Coop also runs a third line from my guitar directly into Pro Tools. He saves these third recordings of my clean guitar in case we later decide that we don't like the guitar tone we recorded. We can find a "virtual amp" tone that we like, right in Pro Tools, or we can play the recording out of Pro Tools, back into one (or both) of the amps, dial in a tone we do like and re-record the part into Pro Tools. I told you it was crazy technical! Seriously, Coop's a genius.

Today's been tiring as we've worked on tuning issues with the Telecaster's G-string (insert joke here) brought on by my tendency to tune the guitar a half-step down, play in the key of "C" and use 13-gauge strings on my rhythm guitars. It's also been tough getting the amp tones we want as there's always a discrepancy between what an amp sounds like when you're standing in front of and what it sounds like through a mic.

Electric rhythm is now done for 3 of the 11 songs. Tomorrow's the big Easter service and then 6 more hours on Monday...