Ozma recording blogs - 1999-2001: Difference between revisions

12.26.00.2346

 

the first studio day for the doubble donkey disc! all of us are feeling great to be back in the studio and back hanging out with bruce, who is quite simply a fun dude to be around. we met at pat's house at 9am and got to bruce's by 10am. we set up drums in the main room, bass head (bruce's ashdown) and cab (my ampeg 4x10) in the side room, jose's marshall jcm 900 in the main room and his cab all the way in the bathroom. he first tried using his new 2x12 def leppard-signed vintage marshall cab, but we opted for a 4x12, which definitely had a fuller tone. the three of us tracked rhythm for maybe in an alternate dimension, the business of getting down, flight of the bootymechanic, and flight of the bootymadamoiselle. we took an hour break around 6pm to eat with bruce and his wife and daughter at the silver spoon, a restaurant around the block from the studio. approximately 10 hours of studio time, totaling 10 hours over 1 day.

at noon on our third day, we walked in and bruce was vacuuming the studio - we realized we had left the place in total shambles. ryen went to get coffee to wake us all up, and we got the snare drum rolls and soft cymbal hits for the "flight of yuri gagarin" at the beginning of the russian EP. then we began work on jose's guitar tracks for the bootysongs, using protools ampfarm distortion (we'll do the "naturally occurring" marshall amp distortion tracks later). when we hit the song "no one needs to know," we had to spend a fair amount of time working on getting the drum solo in the middle to sound as rad as possible - it's a very exposed part (just bass and drums) so we wanted to be sure to get the actual drum tones sounding sweet. work on jose's parts continued until 8pm, his tracks about 2/3rds done when we left. approx. 8 hrs studio time, totaling 26 hrs over 3 days.

the fourth studio day began with finishing up jose's ampfarm guitar tracks, including "the business of getting down." those got finished quickly (jose is incredible in the studio - very measured, and steady, but still really energetic), and we went to work on bass. bruce (co-producer) made the suggestion on a couple songs to take as much of the live bass (done when getting drum tracks) as possible, since the feeling of a bass player and a drummer playing together in the same room is a lot different than a bass player sitting on a chair listen to a recorded drum track and trying to groove with it. so, for the songs maybe in an alternate dimension, jose's bootysong, and star's bootysong (the airport themed song). while doing bass for tetris and no one needs to know, we realized that pat's floor tom was tuned to an E flat, except it was a slightly out of tune E flat... so it was sounding pretty funky next to the sustained A flat i play at the beginning of tetris. have no fear! pro tools fixes everything. we were able to digitally tune the floor tom up just slightly so that things didn't sound so muddy. everyone was quite happy. we wrapped around 8:00 and bruce set up 3 mics through his P.A. in the main studio room so that we could have a quick run-through of our set for the goat punishment show tomorrow. always very fun to practice in new places... though it was louder than hell in that room. approx. 8 hrs studio time, totaling 34 hrs over 4 days.

01.02.01.2023

01.03.01.2204

01.04.01.2337

01.05.01.2337

01.10.01.2354

01.12.01.0719

this friday was one of the funnest studio days yet. we went in a little after noon, and immediately got to work on vocals for the intro to the russian side. bruce set up a big blanket on a stand, to shield sound between two mics in the main studio room. that minimized the bleed when ryen and i went in to sing the "bum bum bums" you will hear at the beginning of the russian side. without the blanket, ryen's vocals would have been audible on my track, and vice versa... so in order to be able to adjust the volumes of the two tracks later, bruce set up the blanket. sounds complicated, but, simple, if you think about it. we did 12 takes of 2 of us singing the same vocals, so there are a total of 24 voices in the mix... which achieved the marching-russian-army sound we were going for. we sang the same thing (just 4 voices this time, though) for the finale of the russian side. soon after that, jose arrived with moranne as ryen and i were recording our token balalaika tracks, me on the russian intro and ryen on "no one needs to know." if you haven't ever seen one, the balalaika is a triangular-bodied guitarlike instrument from russia. they come in many sizes, although i believe they always have just three strings. ryen came into possession of a couple balalaikas, thanks to his parents, and one of them appears on this recording multiple times. we left around 6pm, to go play the surprise acoustic/electric show at no future in pasadena, which was a real treat for all of us, i think. i'd like to think it also worked as a thank you of sorts for our wonderfully supportive parents, who got to see us perform up close - at a place where they didn't have to plug their ears - for the first time in ages. we really do have the greatest parents, all five of us. i mean, not only do they buy us balalaikas, but more importantly, they support us when we decide to take time off school to do US tours with weezer. we love you very much. total studio time 76 hrs over 10 days.

01.17.01.1144

our 12th studio day was a bit of a bummer... we started at 2pm, all stoked to get vocal tracks on bootymaster, but when ryen got to the middle of the song, he proclaimed firmly that it was "too fast" for him to sing vocals. in the process of editing the song to make it a little easier for him to sing vocals, protools wound up crashing, and due to some inexplicable technological catastrophe, some keyboard, guitar, and vocal tracks were lost from bootymaster. i've seen a lot of stuff in my day working with computers... but this one stumped us all. we ran norton unerase on bruce's hard drive and we were able to track down almost all of the lost files... but we may still have to bring ryen's amp back to the studio to rerecord his rhythm guitar track. this whole shenanigan took from 2pm until about 6pm. somewhere along the line i had the realization that recording pre-written songs isn't really a creative process. the writing of the songs is the creative process... the recording of them is something like work (but not really, since it's fun) and something like performance (but not really, since you can take as many tries as you like to get a part sounding good). that could perhaps explain why i have recently been feeling a little unfulfilled creatively. as much as i love these songs, i am looking forward to getting this record out, performing these songs next to all our previously released songs, and starting work on more new music. anyway, i'm not going to count the time spent today in the log, since we won't be charged for it, but i am going to count the day as a day spent, since we were all at the studio and we all had to deal with the problem. total studio time 84 hrs over 12 days.

01.18.01.1056

we straggled in on this glorious thursday afternoon by 1pm and began picking up the pieces after our little protools blunder yesterday. things turned out well, though - we got good bootymaster vocals (including lots of "yeah yeahs"). after that, we worked on continental drift, after lyrics were completed only minutes before they were to be recorded. bruce had to leave early to go to san diego for a 9pm show with his band supremium, so we wrapped around 6pm, making it only a 5 hour recording session. total studio time 89 hrs over 12 days.

01.19.01.1110

starting at noon today, we worked on vocals for the business of getting down. bruce suggested we experiment with some doubling on certain sections, and so we did. after the verses and choruses were done, we set up two mics in the same room so ryen and i could record the ending harmonies at the same time. those were lots of fun... imagine screaming "get down to business" for 20 minutes. continuing with the double-team mic setup, we moved on to no one needs to know. ryen and i sang it once through to get a scratch backing vocal, then i spent an hour or so getting a finalized lead vocal. finally, ryen came in and fixed up the background vocal track. both songs are totally finished now, except for one jose vocal on no one needs to know, which we'll do when we record the leads for his song. with the last hour, we plugged ryen's guitar into the board to rerecord his bootymaster rhythm guitar track, and a lead on the business of getting down that we had forgotten to record earlier. we had to head into pasadena for the tibetan fundraiser show by 9, so we wrapped right at 7pm after 7 hours of recording. total studio time 96 hrs over 12 days.

01.22.01.1144

finally, our first day of mixing! we're not even totally done with tracking yet - there are still odds and ends that need to get overdubbed and we still have to do the vocals on jose's song, but we decided it'd be best if we started mixing a little early so that we don't leave it all for the last minutes, when our ears may be tired. we started with no one needs to know around noon, bruce tweaked the drum sounds for about 2 hours to get them really right on... it was definitely worth it, the drums sound fantastic on this record! the entire mix was impressing us, and just when we thought bruce couldn't make it sound any better, he ran it through the "better box," a mastering plug-in for protools that bruce says "just makes everything sound better." it lived up to it's name... next was the mix for continental drift, and we wound up doing some overdubs in the process, like jose vocals and keyboards in the later parts of the song. we did a mix of that one by about 6 or 7, and we got a little work done cleaning up flight of the bootymaster before we wrapped at 8. total studio time 104 hrs over 13 days.

we took january 24th off of studio time to listen to mixes and drive down to irvine to perform on the sweater show (KUCI) which was lots of fun. camille, the host, even played a couple of the newly mixed cuts. read the show diary.

01.23.01.0903

our second, very productive day of mixing started a while after noon, with the tetris cover (note: we did some research and found out that this music is actually a traditional russian folk song called "korobeiniki," meaning "merchants" or "peddlers." the words were written in 1861 by the russian poet nikolai nekreyev - though our version is instrumental only. in order to avoid being sued by pazhitnov, the maker of tetris, we will avoid using the word "tetris" in the title of the song). bruce suggested some reverb on the drums in the breakdown, we all agreed, and got a little carried away, deciding to reverse the reverb and put it before the snare hits, which makes the snare drum sound like a whip or something - a very 80s sound. perhaps a little over the top, but... hell... this is the recording we swore we would take all the risks with. anyway, tetris/korobeiniki sounds great, especially the triple-pick-slide near the end, which we ran through a light flange to make it really stand out. then we went to work on jose's vocals for flight of the bootymechanic, which was interesting and fun for all of us - ryen and i both have settled into pretty distinct, separate styles of recording vocals, but jose had never sang lead on a song before. turns out he too has a sort of style when recording. those turned out well, and i did my harmony, and then ryen did his "aah aah aah aah aahs," which were the last vocals recorded today. jose left at 6:30, after we had begun mixing "the business of getting down." ryen and i attempted handclaps for the outtro to this song, but when we left they weren't sounding as good as we wanted them to, so we'll see whether we leave them in or alter them, or what. we wrapped around 7:30pm. total studio time 111 hrs over 14 days.

01.25.01.1120

01.26.01

today, our last real studio day, was the "final mix changes" session. we had all listened previously and made notes about things we wanted to change, so we got right to it. a little more keyboards here (no one needs to know), a little less vocals there (you know the story), and more guitars everywhere! adam orth (formerly of shufflepuck) taught us one of our most important lessons as far as mixing rock records go... always keep the guitars up in the mix. in typical ozma fashion, we also left some of the actual recording until the very last possible minutes - first ryen and i dropped in our vocals in the "astronaut/cosmonaut" section of you know the story, and later on we found ourselves both in the main studio room, sitting around a single mic, ryen with bruce's beautiful gretsch acoustic and i with bruce's new doubble-bass. that's how we recorded the very first music you'll hear when you play the CD. it's a folky sound, just what we imagined for the introduction to the CD. i had to leave at 7 to get to no future cafe by 7:30 to sound check with at livingston park, a band i'm playing a little bass for (the frontman is mike elliott, formerly of tomracer). the others stayed there until 8 and burned CDs of the mixes, which we listened to over boggle at jose's house after the show. total studio time 128 hrs over 16 days.

01.29.01

pat and i went down to bruce's at 8pm today to do the final formatting for the CD, although bruce's practice with vanessa paradise went late and we didn't get started until 9:30. bruce had been listening to our CD over the weekend, and he had the genius suggestion to lower the EQ at 40hz, which really cleared up the sound, made things less muddier, particularly guitars. i can really hear the drum set well now, especially the kick drum, which was previously a bit clouded by the low EQ frequencies. good call, bruce! we flew the final mixes of all the songs into adaptec jam, the audio layout program, and adjusted the silences and determined where the track IDs would fall. by 12:30 we had 2 copies of what will most likely be the exact same CD our listeners will hear. we send it off to the duplicators tomorrow (or wednesday, if we find any problem with it tonight). i think i speak for the entire band when i say that it has been a pleasure recording these songs, and a wonderful few weeks with bruce's place as our 2nd home. now we send it out into the world and hope that these songs wind up meaning as much to you as they do to us. blast it. [metalsign.]