As of the beginning of the month, I’ve completed the album, speeding through a month and a week of recording of 13 songs, 11 or 12 of which we’ll use. Right now, we’re working on the artwork, and it’s turning out pretty kick ass. Then we press the copies, and pick a publicist, perhaps an A&R company to shop it around, maybe get a few placements, maybe a record deal, and go for broke on the tour. It’s exciting to think that the album will be on it’s way in a few short months, and I’ll be back in the saddle so to speak.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. This morning is my birthday, and I can’t think of a better way to spend it than going to work, having a surprise party thrown sometime in the day, then going out for a night on the town. After that, I heard a rumor that there’s ice cream cake waiting in the fridge. Feel free to wish me the best on my birthday!

I should be in the studio at this very moment, beginning to lay down some bass parts to go with the very excellent drums that were played last week by Eric Lense. However, we had a minor setback, which is technically a positive thing. We had inadvertently been recording the drums in the dreaded high resolution format (96 kHz, 24 bit), which is pretty awesome sounding, but takes up the most amount of space on a hard drive, since it essentially captures every little nuance of the recording. The thing about 96kHz, is that while some programs are totally cool with it, other programs or computers totally can’t handle the process. Today, I was going to go to Jake’s apartment to get some bass and hopefully some guitars done, but last night Jake realized that since the tracks were saved in the high format, his computer couldn’t handle the high quality awesomeness that the drum tracks were. So, instead of recording my album, I’m sitting at home, figuring out what to do with the afternoon.

Never fear, dear follower of my recording process! I have studio time this upcoming Tuesday and Wednesday, where the bass and guitars will be recorded.

This past Wednesday and Thursday I started recording my next album, along with Eric Lense, the drummer for the album, and Jake Skolnick, the producer. It went really well. We started out by tracking the drums along with a scratch rhythm guitar. We had a lot to get accomplished in a short amount of time, since we had about three hours on Wednesday and up to five hours on Thursday for drums, before Eric would be booked for a longer amount of time (he’s currently in three different projects, is about to record a full length with his main project, The Instant Classic, and is also planning a tour for them). Still, we had 13 songs on the roster, and three of them would be percussion only. The other ten we needed to get good drums on, and quick. The only problem was that Eric hadn’t heard and of the songs until two nights before, when I sent him 4 songs. The majority of the tracks he hadn’t heard at all before stepping foot into the studio. Still wee performed admirable and got the ten drum songs completed in seven hours over two days. Plus they sound really kickass. So even though I had July 4th long weekend in between then and now, I’m still feeling the after effects of a couple of great studio sessions. The next session is either this Tuesday or Saturday, and I can’t wait to get back to lay down some drums and guitars.