Fantasy World has been mastered

The last step in recording is called Mastering. Mastering is that last little bit of audio polish that shines up a recording and makes it really sparkle. Not that I consider my music sparkly. Or glittery, it’s not glittery either.

Anyway, Mike and I have been trying for weeks now to mastering these five tracks on our own and discovered that mastering is an art unto itself. Fortunately, we know one of the best mastering engineers in Nashville, Vinnie Alibrandi. I just got some excerpts back from Vinnie and they sound so good!

That means I’m one step closer to an actual release. Fantasy World, here we come!

Buckley’s Revenge @ the Vibe Dial

Fantasy World Updates

So I finished tracking guitars at Vibe Dial Studios on Sunday.  We thought we had everything finished up when there’s that one little part that I just had to have in there.  The song just wouldn’t be right without it.  In the next few weeks I’ll start recording vocals and any odds and ends that need to be added.  I’m still hoping for a July release, so keep your ears open for more news in that area.  I’ll try to get some more pics posted when we start working on vocals.

Fantasy World is coming

Mike Estok and I got together Tuesday night at his Vibe Dial Studios to start working on the record. It’s going to be 6 songs, so technically an EP, and I’m calling it Fantasy World. I had another title in mind, but I might that one later, so I won’t spoil it here.

We were just getting the basics down for now, rough acoustic work tracks and laying out the structure of each song so we know what to record and all that. He’ll be tracking drums Monday and hopefully I’ll be able to drop by and give a listen.

I’ll be adding pictures to the Fantasy World EP Sessions gallery, so check back for more pics as we keep recording. I’ll try to get someone to get some of me next time. Being the photographer too makes it a little difficult to get pics of yourself, ya know?

Recording pre-dates Edison’s

I heard about this yesterday on NPR and was going to blog about it anyway. Luckily, Wired posted a story on it too and conveniently gave me the link to the actual recording.

A French inventor named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville decided to make drawings of sounds, so he hooked up a horn (old-0school speaker) to a needle that etched the sound onto a piece of paper that was coated in oil-lamp soot. His idea was to simply enjoy the art of the music in a drawn form. But this year, a music researcher discovered the phonautograms (pictures of sound waves) and sent to Bell Labs to see if they could deduce actual sounds out of them. The result (after some tweaking) was the following clip:

Ok, so it’s not going to win a Grammy or anything, but it predates Edison’s recordings by 17 years. So while he wasn’t the first to actual record a sound, he was the first to play one back.

Working on 11:11

Tuesday night Mike, Paul, and I got together and continued working on an acoustic version of 11:11.  Mike and I started it last week, so Paul came in to add some really cool Tremolo Rhodes to it.  Unfortunately, there were major-league driver issues with the keyboard, so it took a while to get to the point where we actually tracked something.

Mike and Paul also laid down the background vocals, which sound amazing!  The funny part: we worked up the parts based on what I thought I had been singing since I wrote the song.  Yet every time we listened to the playback, there was just something not quite right about it.  Ends up, I was singing something different than what I told them I was singing, so I had to go back in and retrack my lead vocal to match what they were doing!

So, I’ll post that here as soon as we get it finished.  I’m hoping we can get the full band in to start tracking other songs and begin putting together an album soon.