Jason Caddell.com | news
3 August 2006
We're on day three of mixing the Get Him Eat Him record here at Silver Sonya, and Chad Clark is once again proving that his mixing skills are a force to be reckoned with. The GHEH guys got to Washington on the 29th, and we tracked vocals and overdubs for three days before starting to mix the day before yesterday. We ran out of time tracking, though, and Don was kind enough to allow me to set up my own rig in the Inner Ear live room to continue tracking overdubs Daniel Lanois-style while The Evens finished mixing in the control room. It was our own funny little assembly line; we'd finish some harmonies and a tambourine track, dump the files to a flash drive, and run it down the hall to Chad, who'd add the files to the mix in progress.
It's been a pretty crazy process: tracking drums and bass for a weekend at Studio G, guitars for a weekend here at Inner Ear, a couple weeks of overdubs and experiments in New York and New Jersey, keyboard parts shipped in from Raf in Portland, then what was going to be three but became five days of vocal and overdub tracking here at Inner Ear. But it's all paying off: the mixes sound spectacular, and they're adding up to what's going to be an exceptional record. Big shout out to Charles Bissell from the Wrens and Chris Brown for some great sounding guitars, keys and horns.
In other news, the Rose Studio G Demo has been mastered and sounds fantastic. Everyone that participated in that project did a great job, and now we're going to try to get it into the hands of some folks that would be into supporting the project.
The Cex record has been out for a while now, and people that write about music seem to like it quite a bit. I highly recommend it. You're going to be much better off getting adjusted to Cex's music now, before it completely replaces all other media. A gypsy I met on Randolph Street told me that Rjyan is working on a new record that's made almost exclusively from samples of a famous band. I cannot confirm or deny this rumor, but my enormous red and yellow 'CEX' flag is still hanging off my front porch, flapping in the breeze, and it's gonna stay there despite all these fines I've been getting from the city.
TapeOpCon was a slightly surreal good time this year: several hundred scruffy recording geeks marooned on a golf resort outside of Tuscon made for some fun compare-n-contrast moments with middle aged golf foursomes and drunken wedding parties. I enjoyed being on the Freelance Engineering panel, and having the opportunity to share experiences with Dana Gumbiner, Matt Krassner, and Peter Katis. (It was a bummer that Jonathan Kreinek couldn't make it.) Hopefully we made some sense and gave the folks that attended the panel some useful information. The Best Panel Award definitely went to 'Songs That Made Me Want To Record'. My favorites on that panel: Don talking about being mystified by the number of musicians on the recording of Cream's 'Badge'; Joel Hamilton talked in vivid detail about the crazy sonics of The Meters' Cissy Strut; and Jim Dickinson waxed poetic on collaborative musicianship, the extinction of the classic rhythm section, and what it was like to hang out with the Rolling Stones during the recording of 'Wild Horses'.
Back in the wintertime, David Brown (who plays in Travis Morrison's band) and I talked about getting together to record a song of his sometime later in the year. The session finally happened last week. After a day of rehearsal with Brandon Kalber on bass, David Durst on Rhodes, me on guitar, and David on drums and vocals, we all got together in my basement to record. Thanks to a bunch of friends, including Elmer Sharp and Ben Liccardi of Pagoda, Nick Anderson of Parlor Press Records, and Bill Mills of Overland Pro Audio, I was able to assemble an incredible collection of preamps to record the session: an API 3124, Sytek MPX-4Aii, Chandler TG2, UA 2108, UA 610, and a Distressor. While great preamps certainly matter, most of the work we did was with the sources. David put new heads on his drums, tuned them up, and we specifically tuned the snare nice and low for a thwacky, Spoon-inspired sound. We used my refurbished Bassman for Brandon's P Bass, and ran the Rhodes through an Ampeg Gemini II. What we've got now sounds like the makings of a modern Al Green-style recording, and I can't wait to mix it.
In the immediate future, we start work on the next Pash record on August 11 here at Inner Ear. More projects are in the works as well....but I gotta go put my two cents in on a mix.
As always, feel free to visit the contact page and drop me a line.