Working, Working, Working…

As Mark said in his post, a lot of good progress was made this past week. Despite the computer problems we've both been experiencing we did a lot of great stuff. WOTW is just about done; a few more lyrics to write, arrange a touch more, and we're all done. This song kind of crept up on us very quickly and it's turning out to be one of the stronger tunes in our expanding catalog.

I'm glad Mark liked the vocal ideas I came up with. I had them in my head ever since Mark played me the original song idea, but it took me a while to get around to recording them. I think it fills things in nicely.

Mark's new song (Awaken The Man) kicks some major booty! Some more great old-school prog... he's been quite inspired lately.

I'm hoping that the new RAM for my computer will help aleviate the problems I've been having. Nothing like feeling your inspiration get sucked away while trying to figure out why your computer keeps crashing...

Studio Session 6/9/05

We had another reasonably good night of results in our weekly studio session last night; on the slate was the continuing work on Weight of the World (w/t). Though our approach will be decidedly minimal, with fairly simple arrangements and no forays into extended soloing (grin), I think that the the outcome will be amazing. The new harmonies that Josh has composed make all the difference, IMHO.

We also did some work on the newest song we've started work on, tentatively called Awaken the Man. It's got a sly nod and wink to Genesis in the Mellotron ascension in the opening, which has a bit of a WOTS-esque vibe to it. Going back to my youth, I've always been a huge fan of Genesis - so it's only natural to hear their influence in much of my writing. The ironic thing is, the original chords for that opening sequence were actually written by Josh - and when I heard them played on the tron, I knew exactly where we needed to take it. And, we did. :) Got some nice Obie in that tune too. (I just wish I could play it as well as Tony Banks.)

Despite the fact that both Josh and I have relatively new computers specifically purchased and configured to run music software in our respective home studios, we both continue to have occasional "glitches"; I'm hoping that the recent purchase of the newest SONAR version (for me) and some serious RAM (for Josh) will help to minimize that. NOTHING stops the creative flow quicker than having to switch to "tech support" mode. I'd much rather be a musician than a technician, ya know?

Anyway, looking forward to the next session, and hope to put in some time over the next week tweaking and mixing. A recent discovery in drum sample routing should make for a massive improvement in my ability to get good sounds (and mixes) and a remix of some of the earlier tunes may be in order to take advantage of that new knowledge. Of course, we're eventually going to have real drums on all the tracks anyway, but in the meantime it'd be nice to have the existing ones sound even better... ;-)

New stuff on the horizon

Josh has been spending some more time behind the board; he worked on one of the new songs a bit and made some real progress... "Weight of the World" (working title) is a laid-back, acoustic guitar and piano-based track, and the new changes/updates that Josh made this weekend really spruced it up a lot. I'm looking forward to working on that tune in this week's session.

In addition, we're pretty much done the recording process on "Turn It Around" (working title), our newest prog epic - I'm also really excited about this one. Gotta start setting up effects busses to prepare for final mixing on it - lots of work ahead!

In the meantime, another new one is getting closer to completion as well - "The Bottom/Between Two Lives" (working title) is a dreamy, contemplative tune that builds into a prog-rock crescendo. That one is coming along, probably about 50-60% done so far.

My first entry

Cool - a new feature on the site! Big ups to Josh for continuing to add new functionality to our site.

Josh already mentioned some of the work we were doing last night. It's pretty wild that we have so many different songs in varying states of completion. I know in most of my previous projects, we pretty much focused on and wrote one song at a time; I much prefer this "multi-tasking" method, since it allows us to switch to a different song if we're just not "feeling it."

"Turn It Around" (or whatever we end up calling it) has really surpassed my expectations... there were originally parts of the song that I felt didn't cleanly mesh, most notably the lyrics/music. These were (far and away) the hardest lyrics to write that Josh and I have worked on so far. The concept wasn't really concrete until only just recently; once we finally nailed it down it became a lot easier to compose not only the rest of the lyrics but also the accompanying music.

I really like the guitar work that Josh laid down last night; I was a bit worried going into it, considering that our previous efforts to add guitar parts seemed like we were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. In last night's session, it just really fell together and we're both happy with the results. Josh found a killer tone with just the right amount of drive, and it's sweet. The parts are fairly low-key, but varied enough to be interesting as well.

Looking forward to the next session!

New Song Progress

Hey, I got the first diary post. Ain't I lucky?

We finished recording our new song, the second "epic." At this time I think we're going to call it Turn It Around, but that hasn't been officially set in stone yet. We struggled a bit with this one, especially the lyrics. It was very hard getting the words exactly right (isn't that always the case?) and we actually put it on hold for a little while so we could come back to it with fresh ears and perspective.

The guitar work also took quite a bit of time. I wanted to keep it very simple so it could lay in the background a bit. I always struggle with my rhythm parts; I always want to be more creative than I think I'm being. Needless to say I'm glad it's over with, and now comes the fun part — mixdown. (gasp!)

Since we finished up with Turn It Around pretty early in the evening we started working on another song we had some ideas for. This one is a slow, acoustic song. I think we're shooting for the "keep it simple" approach in terms of instrumentation and vocal harmony. It definitely won't be as bombastic as some of our other tunes. We spent the night working on the chord progression for the bridge. I'm hearing one or two more chords at the end that I just didn't have under my fingers, so I'm going to try and play around with it a little more this week to see if I can flesh them out.

Mark also sent me a quick demo of a new song idea he came up with. All I can say is that it flat out kicks ass! Very old-school prog and I'm really looking forward to working on that. Realistically we have two songs (the acoustic one I just mentioned and another) before we can get to this one, but I'm really looking forward to it.

At some point we need to start talking more seriously about releasing an EP or full-length CD; we'll see how much music we have when these new songs are finished and mixed.