Bouncing out Stones

After a summer full of shows, the end of August has rolled around and with the gig calendar looking thinner, it seemed like a good opportunity to set some time aside to do some recording. Having recorded several previous demos on a few different pieces of recording hardware, we had yet to come up with anything that was even close to capturing our sound. This time we tried something different - the back room at my shop, Westside Stories. While it still might be far from studio quality work, we were pretty happy with the end result as it felt the closest we've come to recreating our live sound.

We've added several new songs to set and at the end of August we set a night aside to record two of them: Moving Stones and Bounce. We've been playing both for months at our shows now, and the two were written in tandem at our rehearsals, but evolved in very different ways.

Bounce was a riff that had been literally bouncing around my fretboard for years but I had done nothing with. I sent Jackie a rough recording and showed up at rehearsal one night to find she had worked out lyrics and melody. It all seemed to fit almost seamlessly.

Stones on the other hand evolved out of a more jam band influenced riff I had been playing with. I wrote the lyrics and made a recording of me singing the melody and sent it over to Jackie for process I've come to appreciate as "translation", whereby Jackie translates it from near monotone gibberish into music. The lyrics came to me during the day while I was working at the bookstore, at the time reading Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections".

I've received a few questions about how we got the sound on the recordings, so I thought I'd use this post to talk about some the hardware I'm using. The space in the shop is basically a rectangle surrounded by bookcases.  This picture is Jackie and I sitting in the back corner of the shop, looking "natural."

Our hardware is pretty straightforward - I used an AT4040 mic on the guitars and vocal trax (though I did switch to an AKG for Jackie's backing vocal track). I felt like I was getting a real deep guitar sound, so to mitigate the boom I was getting I ended up positioning the mic pretty far up the fretboard, but pointing towards the sound hole. The mic was plugged into an old mBox2pro, which was connected to my iMac, running Logic Pro 9. Both of us recorded two parts on each song. I played a basic rythem pattern on each and recorded a lead line over it and on Bounce added a third muted guitar line that just plays lightly in the background. Jackie recorded the melody and then overdubbed some backing vocal harmonies in each song.

I wanted to add some percussion, but didn't want to deal with digital drums and certainly wasn't bringing a full drum kit into the store. Being a second hand bookstore, people regularly stop in asking if I buy books. A few weeks earlier, one customer also asked if I wanted a washboard, which I took and still had handy in the store. Using a guitar pick on it, I used the AT4040 to add a swooshing percussion line to Bounce. For Stones, I was envisioning Ramble On inspired tapping pattern, which I accomplished by drumming on a book.  I found James Patterson's Kill Alex Cross to have the best tone. At least it's good for something.