The Recording Process

Ever wonder how an album is recorded?  Prepare for a long description. 

First, you know, you gotta write the album. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to describe how that happens. Just the sheer number of decisions on chords, progressions, rhythms, words, layers upon layers of meaning. Well leave that discussion for another time. 

The huge conundrum of recording a song is the one versus many problem. If you play a song as a group (as god intended), and record all the parts simultaneously on one room, you have no ability to change the relative volume or influence of any one part (called mixing). So you have to have a perfect mix at recording (quite impossible), Or you have to record all of the parts individually so that pro level mixing can be done. But it is so hard to play a single part by oneself. The whole point of playing a song with a group is the unspoken communication that goes on all the time. Playing a song as a group allows the individual to use the group memory for what comes next. And just simple things like, when I see the vocalist really reaching deep for the next chorus I adjust my volume and emotion accordingly. This cannot be done solo. But it has to feel like that is occurring on the final recording. 

So we use what we call a scratch track. We make a simplified recording of the song as a group in a room, all facing each other. It has to be done against a “click track”, which controls our tempo explicitly. Let me tell you, this is not easy. As a live band, the concept of time seems very concrete, but time is an incredibly flexible thing to a live group. We speed up and slow down slightly to achieve an effect that seems like perfect time. Much like kerning in fonts. Absolute spacing is inhuman. But absolute tempo is a sad necessity of recording individual tracks. 

Athol Studio:

So prior to the final recording session, we went to a studio in Athol (of all places) to record the scratch tracks, which have as perfect time as we can muster, still retaining the feel of the song we intend to record. This took about 5 hours of studio time for all nine songs of the album. 

Oh yeah, the click track. In the studio, we all wear “cans” (high quality stereo headsets). 

We each have control over the volume of numerous channels they this box:

Notice the channel labeled “click”. A metronome click set to the desired tempo is piped into that channel. All of the other channels are of the different instruments or vocals. So you hear only what you want while playing in a circle with a lot of bleed between the channels (eg the drums come thru the vocalists mike). 

Studio:

This is the Adobe studio at Sonic Ranch. 

Said to be the favorite studio of Cody Jinks. It’s just a big old Adobe building split in half on the inside. The Adobe lends itself well to recording with modifications for sound proofing. 

The sound booth. 

The heart of any studio sound booth is the big board. This gem from the 1970s captures the warmest parts of the instruments and vocals. Perfect for country. 

Here are Mario, the sound engineer, and Diego, assisting at the patch board. It took about a half day to get all the mikes set up and the channels adjusted for recording. 


The sound booth is quite large. That’s Eric the keyboard player and Josh the drummer awaiting their turns in the sound booth. 


Our social media manager, Cody, is also here. He sings terribly in a very entertaining way and for some reason I don’t understand, seems an extremely good luck charm. He’s actually a huge part of the success of our team. We have the goods. He makes people look. And he’s very good at it. 


Even though it seems most of us are just sitting around most of the time, we are all always listening, either jacked into our own mix box, or just to the ambient booth sound. More ears all the time. Checking. Rechecking. Here is Jack, our lead guitar, double checking the rhythm guitar track. 

As described above, one at a time we go into the booth to record our individual parts against the scratch track, click track and each newly recorded track. 

The big board turns analog signals into digital that are then fed to a high zoot Mac running what I believe is Avid Pro Tools. 


Once digitized, the signals can be manipulated in a wide variety of ways. In the old days you had to have a completely perfect take from the entire group. Hence “take 3045”. With this software we can patch in a fix on one note or and entire verse, either live against playback, or patching from another take. We typically do three takes per part — entire song. Then we take the best one and patch any errors from one of the other two takes. Voila. A flawless track in 30 minutes. 

We are currently on day 3 of an 8 day session and we have about 40% of the tracks laid down. Still working through the rhythm instruments. 

Here’s Colby recording a rhythm guitar part from “Nothing to Lose”. You can hear him singing in the scratch track playback. But right now he is focused on laying down just the guitar track. 

Here’s me in the studio with the guys heckling from the booth. Got all my tracks down today. 


I was wrong. There seems to be four mikes and a pickup on my acoustic bass. That’s five channels, which they will mix masterfully into one bass track. I was wrong. I think only two of the mikes were in use, and he probably just humored me by plugging in my DI but didn’t use that signal. 


Had to borrow Colby’s pocket knife to scrape the ridge between my E and A strings down a bit to reduce string clicking. Don’t tell Paul, my luthier. The clicks never show up live in a gig because I’m only running off a pick up. But the studio mikes pick up the clicks big time. So, bass surgery. 

This is our producer, Kyler. Colby’s on the left (duh). The producer specifies order of recording and is unyielding on the quality and feel of each track. “Get back in there and do it again.” And “That’s enough beer for you, Brian.”

Our tracking and mixing engineer, Mario. An amazing talent with and extensive resume for a 26 year old, and warmest smile in the biz. 

Once we get all the tracks down. Including lots of silly frills like, I don’t know, tambourine, then the mixing engineer goes to work mixing all the tracks at proper volumes with many other details that I couldn’t possibly explain to put all the pieces back together into what sounds like the song as we intended, played as a group.