Chase The Shades baby...

Last night we knocked out some serious parts for "Chase The Shades of Night". Mr Tom Sasso was alive and well after winning his cage fight brawl contest this weekend and in top form for taking vids and pics. See?

He brought chips with him to shower upon the people and my floor. Note Christian is holding the bag upside down in this picture. Yay! Rats to follow!

Anyway - i've been using a pair of older AKG 451EB small diaphram condenser mics for things like overheads, percussion, acoustic guitars, etc. for like 8 or 9 years now and i've grown very used to them (i.e. love them), but in recent weeks, they have been crappin out on me in the middle of sessions. They both have different noise issues and don't sound matched any more. Time to send 'em out for a good old fashioned fixin'. In the meantime, i had to bite the bullet and buy new mics. ugh. i literally can not stop buying equipment - even when i want to. so last night we tried out a pair of josephson C42 mics. i liked them on the acoustics and percussion bits we used them on, tomorrow night we'll see how they perform on drum overheads. here's me setting them up for some acoustic tracks:

in addition to guitars, we put some rhodes lines down for the song as well. I know, we don't own a rhodes, but through the magic of computers, almost anyone can without the worry of keeping it tune or storing it.

finally, here's tom's little video montage of the night.

Not too much to report this week as one of the bands tim and i are in with Jeff Ulrich (the Ringout) had a show on monday, so the usual session was off. We played in Somerville, NJ at a burger joint. Yes, a burger restaurant. Like with a big counter with registers and guys in red uniforms working the grill. They moved all the tables out of the way, set up a PA, and let the good times roll. We ate burgers and rocked. Actually, Jeff had a burger and i had rice pudding. The show was ok, it was the second show we've done with our new bass player Scott, who is working out superbly. We love him. Not too much to note about the night other than me locking the keys in the van and having to pay 100 dollars to some guy to come out at 11 PM and pick his way into it. Good Times indeed. So a couple days later, Tim and I were back in the studio wth a local band who finished early and we decided to make up for not doing a New Ancients session on monday. We didn't get much accomplised other than scratching out some stuff... here's a pic of tim and the laptop running Ableton Live providing sweet sweet drum beats for bed tracks for "Paper Sky":

I've also done some prelim acoustic drum and bass parts, and the great Anthony Sole was here with some tasty guitar playing on "These Burdens". Hard to believe we are actually making progress. More to come next week for sure - hopefully some more videos too.

A Time For Class

Ever since working on the last Unsent Letters album "Better Than Beautiful", i've wanted to get my hands on a old, used cello to have at the studio. Aaron Anastasi had a couple guys from Princeton come with him one session who were there to play violin and cello for a song or two and the sound of the recorded cello just knocked me out. Now granted, this guy could REALLY play... but i've always wanted to get one. So lo and behold, this christmas, my parents up and got me a cello. Whew! (They actually rented it for me so i could see if i indeed was up for learning it). Now, i've been playing lots of instruments for a number of years, and sort of consider myself able to pick up pretty much anything and within an hour or so get something on it to sound at least good enough to use in one of our super-densely-layered multitracked indy electro-acoustic songs (in a recorded setting). Not So on a Cello. It is one of the hardest things i've ever tried to play. period. There's no faking it on a cello, thats for sure. after 10 minutes or so i sounded like i was playing a tree saw with a cat stretched between 2 ends of a stick. I did however love the challenge and the reward of "sort of getting it" every once in a while. I decided to keep it and start working at it. That was last week. For this weeks session, my good friend and ex band mate Pete Nilsen came in to do some violin for "Great God" over the top of a cello and bowed double bass part i had written and recorded.

In the old days, i was in a band with Pete and his brother John called Choose This Day, along with Matt Agresti on bass. Pete also played violin for the first Million Time Winner album and did some parts for "Jesus Master" on "Light For Dark Eyes" that never made the final cut. *sniff*. Pete spent last year in Russia studying violin with some sort of Ninjia Violin Masters or something and it showed. We started noodling around (he on his violin and me like an idiot on my rented cello) and everyone in the room just started howling it sounded so awesome. By the end of the night we had what may very well be the sonic pinacle of this recording and we haven't even finished one tune! The parts he arranged were that good. I tell you we will be hard pressed to match the level of intensity he brought to this track on the rest of the recording. Check the videos of Pete warming up.
While Pete wrote out his arrangements, tim and i put down a temporary bass track. While we were making noise down in the studio, Matt was upstairs churning out a real New Ancients web page. Soon soon. The page will have a lot of album info from the last release that just couldn't fit in the layout, but it's still interesting none the less. Want to see who played what on Light For Dark Eyes? go see http://www.thenewancients.com (when it's done of course).

not much to report as i was the only one working this night. i scratched a few guitar lines and noodled around with some drum ideas. I also did some programming for beats i'm thinking of using on "Chase The Shades of Night".
I got this groovy little Epiphone Valve Jr. 5 watt guitar amp recently. 5 watts doesn't sound like much does it? like what you'd expect from a desktop ipod speaker set or something. Let me tell you this little thing is the loudest 5 watts i've ever heard. i have a feeling it will show up on almost every song we do for this release.

Well, well... here we go again.

It's 2007 and the New Ancients have begun another album. We already have identified about 10 or 11 tunes to tackle and have begun recording parts for them in hopes to whip up another knockout indy-neuveau-hymn CD. I got a lot of positive feedback about doing a blog on the recording process of the last CD, so it's time to start another one. These blogs will be organized a little differently; first off this one will be a separate blog itself, as the other one by the end was so long and full of embedded quicktime movie clips, that it took 15 minutes to load. Also, speaking of video clips, all the new ones will be hosted on the new boob-tube: Youtube.com, so anyone can see them anytime.Plus, it will save the ORB space on their server not having a 2 dozen or so 6 MB clips of their pastor acting like a mental patient.

This time around the recording process will look much the same as it did for "Light For Dark Eyes", with the exception of some new gear, new instruments, some dandy new microphones and guitar amps, and some new people lending their skills to the party. We should be working every week at least 1 session a week, so look for this thing to be completed around early 2008.
Serious. I'm being realistic.

Ok, on to the show!

The first session began with no ceremony or celebration to speak of, just get in, sit down, shut up and lets go! We began by choosing songs that we wanted to do... some of which are being demanded by people (quite fervently may add) and we started assembling scratch tracks for 5 or 6 of the 11 or so we had picked out. In attendance was Tim Bennett (doing electric guitars), Christian, Michelle, Tom (shootin the vids as usual), Brian Jones, and myself. I think christian did most of the scratch acoustics for the night, and Tim put down a few electric parts. Brian did some glockenspiel for "These Burdens" - i liked it so much i went ahead and ordered one of the same glocks that he has. i love it except for one or 2 of the notes being WAY sharp. oh well, that sort of thing never stopped us before!