Saturday, March 31st

And we're off!

Today involved moving copious amounts of equipment from Coop's (the recording guy) place to our Worship Practice Room to record drums and scratch bass/guitar/vocal. "Scratch" just means that we're not planning on keeping it on the final recording.

We all play together, live, to get as much energy out of the drummer as possible. You just don't get the same energy when you tell a drummer "IMAGINE you're playing with a rockin' band!"














I recruited Mark Kukkamaa to play bass. He's a musical beast who can basically play anything. We work really well together when it comes to coming up with ideas, arrangements and musical parts, so he'll be dropping in later on in the project to throw around some acoustic guitar ideas and more.

I also enlisted Matt Shepard to drum for the project. Matt's one of my regularly-scheduled Sunday morning drummers who recently went to the Pacific Northwest with me to play at some worship events. He's the real deal - a fantastic, hard-hitting rock and roll drummer who would still secretly like to play in a really cool jazz band.














He started out by requesting a "cow bell" sound for his click-track. I thought he was joking (some sort of reference to the infamous Will Farrell "cow bell" skit on SNL) but he was totally serious! It turns out that the cow bell sound "cuts" through the mix, while recording, much better than the traditional click-track sound. Who knew...

It's always nerve wracking recording with somebody for the first time. People respond in radically different ways to the "red light" (which traditionally comes on in studios when the "RECORD" button is pushed). Matt was simply unreal... We thought we'd just dial in our tones, set the position of the mics and then start things tomorrow but Matt was in a zone and things were just clicking. We recorded non-stop from about 2pm to about 8:30pm before finally hitting "the wall" of exhaustion. When it was all said and done, we had drum tracks completed for 7 of the 11 songs!

Coop has the drums sounding unbelievable. He's a total pro who just knows all the recording tricks in the world...

At the end of the day we were all exhausted and I definitely have a bruise on my right butt cheek from sitting on an un-padded bar stool for 6 hours!

Well, home to bed for tonight...