The pre-prod recordings are done!!!

And I've heard them. They sound pretty good, although I'm really looking forward to how the properly recorded tracks will sound once Catherine North and Napier are done mixing them to perfection. To clarify, what has been done so far is all of our songs have been recorded to a single track digital recorder so that they can get a feel for how the songs sound, and can accurately gauge the speed of all of them. This speed will be played into a clicktrack (metronome) that will be fed into the headphones of us while we're recording the actual recordings. This ensures rockstardom, if nothing else.

I'm at a conference in Alberta right now, but I promise to post a link to some of the pre-production files as soon as I get back!

Step 1

Catherine North and Napier needed a rough recording of our 7 tracks which we were recording. So, they sent Duke and Steve Foster over to set up a stereo microphone connected to a Sony DAT recorder. Now, our practice room is already smaller than an Oakville woman's walk-in shoe closet, so with the 6 of us in there, plus two recording agents, and a microphone, and the shiny aluminum case that they brought everything in, it got a bit cramped. Wow that was a long sentence, but it needed to be said.

So we played through all 7 of our songs, and pretty much nailed each one. That's what happens when you play nothing else for a period of around 3 months. I was VERY proud of my guys for being able to get through everything so professionally and quickly. Steve commented on how pleased he was that we had all of our arranging done properly and that he thinks that we'll just rip through the recording because of all the time we've put into it. It's nice when things pay off. Hopefully I'll manage to get copies of some of the rough tracks soon and post a snippet or two up here.

So you want to be a rockstar...

Hi, I'm Kris. I sing and play bass in a band called "Whitey and the Caucasians". That's me in the middle, red shirt with the beautiful smile. No, we're not some radical white supremacy group, click on the site and scroll through the band members and you'll realise that we're actually quite a diverse group. It started out with myself (I'm of African-Indian Descent), and a few white guys, aka the Caucasians. And I wasn't a caucasian, so instead people were calling me Whitey. We added a couple black girls to sing backup (blackup singers I call them) and called it a day. A rock legend was born.

But, you can't have a rock legend without having at least a few songs recorded onto an EP. So after about a year of playing together, the 7 of us have decided that it's time to cut a disc. We decided about a month ago that we were going to record 7 tracks, and started practicing them religiously. It's getting to the point where we can play the songs in our sleep, which will hopefully save us a good amount of time once we actually get to the studio. Which equates to saving us a good amount of money.

Over the past year, we've managed to save around $1000 from gigs. Rather than split money we make at shows, we put it all into the band account, aka a gym sock that I keep under my mattress. Because once money is split into 7, it becomes easy to spend on candy and pornos. but if it's stored in a sock, it gets saved because lets face it, who wants to go through my old gym socks?

With that $1000, and a to-be-determined amount of our individual pocket-money, we set about the process of shopping for a suitable studio. Characteristics we were looking for included proximity, available at all hours, could get us a finished product before the end of the semester, wasn't too expensive, had good products, came strongly recommended, were reasonably cool people to hang with, and most importantly could make us feel like rock stars.

We ended up choosing a collaboration of Catherine North Studios, run by Dan Achen of Junkhouse and Napier Studios run by Duke Foster of The Rayburns (CFNY New Music 1994). It's going to cost us around $2000 to track 7 songs, but at the end I'm fairly confident that we'll have something that we can feel good about.

A few caveats to the reader: We are not looking to make something that is going to rival a $50,000 recording from Metal Works. We're looking to create a good independent record that reflects the level that we're at - a 7-piece band with an unequally distributed 20 years combined band experience that we can sell to friends and fans of the music.

The recording process that we go through over the next couple months will be documented here. So check back often, and enjoy learning from our leaps and stumbles.