Settling in/ tape ready

Here it is!  Blogging it up!  We made it!  Landed in Hudson, NY this very evening and brought tons of stuff - guitars, books, food, etc. - everything we needed to record and sort of feel at home in the bottom of the church.  Have you guys checked out the studio?  We're recording in a church - www.waterfrontstudio.org  Uhhh yep, we're making the sounds there tomorrow.  All spread out.  We're a little nervous because we're jumping right in and doing most of our parts to the songs - some live, some tracked - and Barb's a bit stuffed up.  How could she not be?  Philly warm cold warm cold stuff.  lame.  It's colder here but we're cozy in our basement cave.  I've been drawing.  Barbara has been dreaming scheming about us doing/driving a tour down to Central America and back.  Whew.

We were having some troubles finding a ride up but our friend Liz Fullerton let us borrow her car "Clarence" so we're all good.  Man, Clarence is a diesel genius.  And we packed him up.  And grabbed some good cheese and stuff and I've got my favorite jelly beans and all.  We're set.  In the morning Rachel Russell and Henry Hirsch, both brilliant and both co-producing with us and engineering, are calibrating the tape machine.  We're gonna sort out some contracts, get some breakfast and start in around 11:30am.  Prolly go til late.  Rachel says Henry doesn't really stop to eat.  We eat.          

There's been plenty of pre-production, rehearsals with Rachel and plenty of listening to each other for Bee and I, and we're ready to get to it.  We're recording on tape(2-inch 24 track), a new step for us!  An exciting one.  Tape is especially brilliant for acoustic instruments because you can catch a wider spectrum of sound all warm-like.  And it's a physical human thing too.  You can see all the moving parts and understand in your head that there are magnetized particles and things doing.  But there is no ease of editing.  Involves cutting and splicing tape.  If you mess up, no good.  Gotta do it again.  This is very different from recording on computers where every hair can be manually placed, cut, and shaped, and you can sing the song in isolated parts and fix it later.  The limits of tape rely on us to do it the best we can naturally, all the way through, and these limitations have really brought us back to being solid musically from the get-go.  We recorded our first album LOVE in this way but had gotten away from it for the collaborative album with Hezekiah Jones.  We got a little lost in computer land(kind of had to just because of the way we went about it) and spent way too much time editing our moves.  Got some great stuff, though!!!  Anyways, it's such a different thought approaching a recording knowing that you can change anything you do.  Glad to be back doing it real.

Hope to post some pics and a grand update of how we knocked it out so easily tomorrow.  Wish us luck!  Joy to you ~   Michael