Droppin' Nollij

What's up

Yesterday, it was finally time for me to go in and lay down some kickin' lead vocal tracks. Stumbles to avoid include:

-Don't go out late the night before and come in with even the slightest of hangovers
-Make sure that you bring coffee in the morning
-Eat more than 3 Boston Cream donuts over the course of the day
-Make sure you actually have words WRITTEN for the songs that you're going to sing that day

The day started off with Craig doing some feedback. Not like the constructive type that we learn about in school, but the type that angers parents and scares responsible citizens. That's right, he was cranking the distortion on his amp and overdubbing some serious guitar wails in some of our tracks. Groovy, rock and roll baby. Yeah.

After a few tries, Craig was finally able to get the wail that he was looking for. I think the fact that he brought a groupie, in the form of his friend Jess (shown below) must have helped.



Jess has nothing to do with this story. I just posted this to show you that yes, girls do hang out with us on occasion.



That's Dan from the Rayburns and Napier Park Studios working hard on the 1's and 2's. Napier is in the basement of a house in Dundas, and is where we are recording the melody parts of our tunes.



Rock and roll isn't all about standing up and showing how angstful you can be. Sometimes you get to sit down and be thoughtful. For the 5 hours I was in the studio yesterday, I spent around 2 hour's worth of that actually singing. the rest of the time was spent sitting in that foldup chair. Most of the songs went off fine and without any kind of a hitch, but some of them took longer because I normally just make up the words to them as I'm singing them. What? My dad's from Africa. I was FREESTYLIN y'all!!! But when you have to double tracks (record two different versions, then track them over top of each other to add body and depth), the words have to be the same in both cuts otherwise you end up with a whole lotta mumbly Joe.



Eventually, I was rockin' out so hard that the microphone I was using fell apart. Enter the Napier Park boys, who luckily had some blue masking tape on hand to hold the thing together. I figure that having taped up gear gives me an extra 6 Indie cred points (a scoring system that gives you more points of credibility as an independent musician based on how ghetto your setup is). As we all pointed out, most of Hamilton's music scene is held together by tape and glue. But that's what makes it Hamilton, right?

All in all, a good day's recording. The tracks sound like ass as is, but that's pre-mixing so hopefully the black magic of the Mighty Macintosh will sort all that out. If I smoked anything, I'd smoke it to celebrate a job well done. But I don't smoke, so I just watched startup.com instead, which isn't a bad movie if you're in the mood for a documentary. Just don't rent it for a date.