Rolling

In the past week there has been a flurry of emails. It was actually a textbook definition of the word "flurry." Look up "flurry" in the dictionary and…well, you get it. Me, David, the studio, musicians…confirming everybody's schedules, etc.

Monday, February 27. We're rolling. Day one in the studio was tedious as expected. Recording is not a "fun" process for me. At least not this stage. But we're right on, or maybe even a little ahead of, schedule. Here's what we did on day one:

• Set the tempos for each song and established the click tracks (see glossary).


• Set up the drum kit and (and microphones) and got levels. That took about an hour. We'll reset the levels when Rob Ticherich, the actual drummer, comes in on Tuesday.


• During the Drum setup, I booked two more musicians for sessions. The incomparable Norm Tischler will be playing Sax of two of the songs, and my old friend and band mate Mark Freiman will be playing trumpet on one number. He's a fabulous keyboard player too, but he, like me, has the proverbial day job and really does not have the schedule to do much more with us. Still waiting for my accordion player to call back.


• Recorded some drum loops for a few songs to help me stay in tempo when putting down the guitar tracks. These loops will not end up in the final recording. In fact, we're pretty much done with them now. They were just in my headphones. This is an exacting science which is why, for me, it's tedious.


• Recorded about half of the primary guitar tracks. We put down the six songs on which we're using a full drum kit so that when Rob comes in, we'll have something for him to record.

This was an eight hour work day.

Tuesday we'll try to get the rest of the guitar parts after Rob leaves. He'll be back on Thursday and Friday to finish up any of his parts. Maybe we can even get some of David's bass parts down depending on how accurate I am on my guitar parts. Lemme tell ya, I do not have a terrific natural sense of rhythm.

Michael Seifert, studio owner and our main engineer, will be out on Tuesday. He's having his wisdom teeth pulled. He thinks he's coming back in on Wednesday. We told him we'd see him next week. His right hand man, Jimmy, will be at the controls. Jimmy handled much of the session today and is a fine engineer with great ears. (Not the appearance or size of them - the way he hears stuff.)

I'll let you know how it goes.