So I’m in the process of recording a new album of tunes.  I figure that I’m going to document as much of it as I can here.  First off, there’s no real reason to do it other than the fact that I’ve got a bunch of songs written and I’d like to get them down.  That and I’ve been doing solo gigs here and there over the past couple of months and since I can’t seem to keep a band together, I figure I might as well just start doing this on my own.

I’ve enlisted the help of quite a few friends and this recording adventure has become an international affair as well as a bit of a Maximum Bob reunion.  Dave Avillion and Bob Troia the drummer and bass player from MB have agreed to help out.  Dave’s in Las Vegas and will be doing drum tracks remotely.  Bob is in NYC and will be doing bass parts there.  Tim the guitar player from Sweetwood Groove is going to be doing some of the guitar parts and I’m recording a number of songs that he and I co-wrote so that’ll be pretty cool.  A friend that I’ve done a couple of online collaborations with over the last 2 years will be helping out with keyboards and sound design.  He’s in Australia (hence the international part).

So far things are going fairly smoothly.  The timeline so far has been:

• Early January, I decided I was going to do this.
• Figured out what songs I was going to do, there were 23 on the list initially.
• Spent a couple of nights figuring out tempos for the songs and annoying the hell out of my wife while I tapped away listening to headphones… (there’s nothing more exciting in the recording process than just listening to some idiot tap out tempos trying to figure out BPM (Beats per minute).  I have a very understanding spouse…
• Went down in the basement and fired up the recording gear to get moving on scratch tracks.
• Gear shit the bed, so I had to figure out a new way of recording.
• Again, said spouse was awesome and agreed to let me purchase a new recording rig.
• New rig was delivered and spent a day and a half learning how to use the damned thing (plug and play my ass…)
• Had a gig right about this time (this is still mid-january).  Played a bunch of the songs that I’m planning on recording, too much crowd noise on the recording so I couldn’t tell if they really sounded good or not.  The applause was really good for them, but the amount of talking during the playing makes me think that maybe no one was really paying attention anyway
• Spent a week getting scratch tracks down to cheesy drum loops and just playing my acoustic and singing.  The cheesy drum loops help in that they’re better than just playing to a click track so that I keep everything on tempo, but they’re fairly annoying to listen to for anyone who’s not all that accustomed to them.
• Posted all of the tracks for the core participants to listen to and so far we’re fairly happy.  I only ended up doing 19 of the original 23 because there were 3 songs that I had either recorded before or in one instance sounded too similar to one that I knew was going to make it on the final recording so I figured I’d save it for a later date.
• This past weekend I started recording electric guitars and overdubbing the acoustic.  Again a very understanding wife because in order to get decent tone out of the amp I need to have it fairly loud…
• With 5 songs as a start, Bob and Dave are beginning to do the overdubs.  One song in particular of course proved a bit of a challenge figuring out a good drum pattern for it, but Dave has already been more than cool about it.

So there’s the beginnings of the recording processs.  I’m pretty psyched for it, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to end up with 10-14 songs that I’m really proud of.  Not to mention the fact that it’s very cool to be playing with Dave and Bob again albeit from a fairly large distance.