Tuesday - January 13th, 2009: 11am to 2pm - Today my friend Rich Chiuppi came into engineer the recordings sessions for the songs, 'Rain, Rain' & 'Pray'. The work that Rich and I did on Sunday re-miking the drums paid off. Russ came in and we did some warm-up recordings and we all like the tone that we were getting from the drums.
Russ took five passes at the song, 'Rain, Rain', each time coming closer to the feel of the song. Take 4: Was rock solid in timing, but the drum fills were not fitting the song. Take 5: Was the best in terms of feel and drum fills. Except for a slight drum edit in the last chorus, this will be the drum track that appears on the record.
The mood in the studio was fun, energetic, and creative...Everyone worked well together and had a blast! Rich mainly ran the board and the session, while I just walked around and took pictures and listened...with my fingers and toes crossed. Both Rich and Russ did a fantastic job!
The next song, 'Pray' had a lot of possibilities that we all were throwing around. What type of drum track would the song need? Russ went in and did two takes and we listened back and discussed ideas. Russ went in and recorded a seperate snare drum part that laid beautifully over the chorus of the song & ending. But we decided the drum kit was to busy with drum fills.
We wanted the drum track to be minimalistic because of the drum layers that we were going to experiment with. We listened to the drum track on the song, 'Son of a Preacher' and decided a drum track like that would fit nicely.
So, off to his room Russ went...and within another two takes we got the right drum track. Take 4: was solid with a small drum edit needing to be done coming out of the second guitar solo. The straight drum track that Russ recorded without any fills will give us freedom to add a lot of percussion to add to the songs dramatic feel.Recording session slated for Wednesday, January 14th, 2009.
