Back in July, I started recording a new collection of songs with Allen Morris. We tracked acoustic guitars to a click track for each song. For each song, I laid down a basic guitar track with my Yamaha and then doubled it with Allen’s Epiphone. We got 4 songs done in the first session. We got together a couple of weeks ago and finished acoustic guitars for the remaining 3 songs and got lead vocals on 2 of the songs. Last night, we worked on the vocals for 4 songs. Just one lead vocal to go and we’ll start coloring in the songs.

Here’s a little sneak preview to give you an idea how a song starts off. This is the basic tracks for “I Remember Girls”:

[audio:http://media.toddamusic.com/audio/Todd%20A%20-%20I%20Remember%20Girls%20(rough%20basic%20tracks).mp3]

Before we started, we talked about how to handle a batch of 7 songs quickly. One of the things we came up with was working within a few limitations. One of those being that I didn’t want to over-worry a bunch of guitar tracks. I love combining guitar sounds but I didn’t want to get so involved in that that we spent too much time layering and choosing guitars. That’s how we ended up with these 2 guitars. Allen’s Epiphone is a nice deep complement to my bright Yamaha.

Last night, we spoke a lot about the next steps of coloring the songs in. This collection is going to be more fleshed out than IRL. We may want a drum machine on some songs and live drums on another. But we (or at least I) didn’t know how to proceed best. We decided that I’d make a drum machine beat for one song and we’d see how easy it was to sync to our pre-recorded click and how it sounds with the bed tracks. It’s a simple decision but it helped us define the next step. If we’d thought, “let’s try one with live drums,” we might have wasted a lot of time setting up our recording and getting frustrated.

The songs we’re working on are:
Out the Other
Kari Byron
Babs
Nicole
It’s Too Hot To Larp
I Remember Girls
You Have the Worst Taste in Men