The Blue Wires

The recording process is moving along, albeit at the break neck speed of a turtle, but it’s moving along. Yesterday Jason came over and laid down some funky bass parts. By funky I mean pretty straightforward rock bass parts, so there really isn’t a lot of ‘funk’ hanging out there, but I couldn’t think of a better single word to describe the tracks.

He came and nailed Like You’re A Mouse in 1 1/2 takes! From there we moved on to Go Love Yourself and the eventually on to Yellow Star. That’s where things got a bit tricky. For a pretty simple, straightforward song, it so far has seemed to elude those who have tried to record it.

The first travesty was with my demo scratch track. How my playing could be that far out of time, I will never know! I ended up laying down a simple, and quantized to all hell, keyboard part just so Kevin could play his drum tracks. Then it took Kevin a few takes more then the others to finally get what he wanted out of the drum tracks.

And then there was the bass part. Jason, who nailed the other two songs in just a couple of kick ass takes, struggled with Yellow Star. We went section by section, but we were eventually successful in getting a really rocking track.

I’ve spent the day editing the bass parts together to form one super take for each song. Now they are stronger and more rocking then before.

Up next, yours truly has to start recording his parts. It’s so much easier for me to sit back, press record, and criticize others playing. Now I have to be the one under the microscope. Not fun. The only good news is that I can do the parts without anyone else around. Which is great because I can spare others the torment of my guitar playing. Unfortunately, I probably won’t able to do that when my vocals come around. But that’s a post for another time.

On Sunday Kevin “Machine Gun” Rothermel came over to record the drum tracks for the three songs we’ve chosen to record. In what turned out to be a six and half hour long session we manged to get all three songs tracked and edited.

The drum tracks have a great ‘humanized’ feel to them. In the next two weeks Jason will be next on the list to lay down some of those groovy bass tracks of his so we can really kick this bad boy into the stratosphere.

Well, tonight, the process of recording the first of The Blue Wires songs officially commenced. I recorded ’scratch’ tracks for the three songs we’re going to start recording on Sunday.

A ’scratch’ track, for those not in the know, is a rough (and trust me, it is VERY rough!), recording of a guitar and a vocal track that Kevin can play along with. The tracks are recorded to a metronome, so it will ensure that our drummer man, and subsequently the rest of the band, are in time with not only the song, but each other!

I really hate doing these types of ’scratch’ tracks because they take a while to do, but they always get thrown away in the end. They’re meant to be disposable. Now if there isn’t a metaphor there for the state of music industry, I don’t know where there is one!

More as it comes.

Tonight Viper’s Tooth, um, I mean Minor Planets, er… damn it, The Blue Wires had a rehearsal, an unusual event for a weeknight, but I digress. At that rehearsal we decided the time has finally come for us to (insert trumpets here) start recording!

That’s right, this weekend, the process of recording three songs will commence. It’s a process that frustrates my poor wife to no end, but what can you do? There’s a demand out there. Our loyal fans are chomping at the bit to get their first taste of The Blue Wires sound.

We’ve chosen three songs that we’ll hopefully have finished by the end of March. The songs are called, Like You’re A Mouse, Go Love Yourself, and Yellow Star. I’ll try and post some lyrics soon, if I remember.

Each of the songs are quite different, and each had it’s seed in a different member of the band.

Like You’re A Mouse, was a song I wrote just before putting together this band. It’s a great, at least in my opinion, rock/pop number. It’s definitely one of the strongest songs the band has, and one of our earliest as well. I believe it was the second song we actually worked on together as a band. The first being a song called, At The Speed Of Time.

Go Love Yourself, was the brain child of Peter. He came in one day with this Stone Roses-esque riff, and we just worked it up into one of our funner numbers to play. The song rocks hard, and for some reason my voice sounds a lot like the guy from the Cult. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’ll let you guys tell me when you hear the final recording.

Yellow Star, comes to us courtesy of Kevin the drummer man. Kevin sent the band a demo of a riff he had, and we tore it apart, rebuilt it and ended up with this Radiohead meets Silver Sun Pickups track. The title comes from me trying to come up with something to sing over the song at rehearsal and Kevin wearing a t-shirt that had a picture of, well, a yellow star on it. Inspiration, eh?

One thing I would love to share with you, our loyal fans, is the original email that Kevin sent with that demo:

“I’ve never sent a song idea to a band before, so I figured the best way to do so was to create a incredibly rushed, incomplete and out of key song idea. Maybe we can work on it? Maybe we can all just not acknowledge that this ever happened. Whatever floats your whathaveyou”

Anyway, it’s late, and my ears are still ringing from rehearsal. I’ll try and keep a log of the recording process on the site so you can follow along at home.