Rough Tracks

The last two nights have been spent tracking pre-production type takes of 3 songs.  We've decided to demo 3 of our new songs for this next round of recording.  The purpose is two fold.  It allows us to become familiar with the Digidesign gear, and ProTools.  It will also give us an opportunity to listen critically to the parts we're playing and provide feedback to one another.

Kiss Me Goodbye, Mr. Knowitall, and Silver Lines, which is a new song title for the song we debuted live last week.  Raw drum and bass tracks have been recorded and we will start tracking guitars and vocals over the weekend.  I'm hopeful by the end of next week all recording for these tracks will be complete and then we can spend a week or so learning how to use the effects plug ins, mix automation, as well as final eq'ing for cd mastering. 

The beauty of digital recording became apparent last night.  We peformed a handful of punch-ins on the bass and were able to easily select the section we wanted to punch in visually, provide a 4 bar lead in, and 2 bars out of the take.  We were able to do all bass recording and punch ins for three tracks in about 2 1/2 hours, and that was with the learning curve of ProTools as an obstacle.

When we did our last set of demos to ADAT, the punch process involved setting locations, punch in and punch out points, and then recording.  You had to hope that the punch in/out points weren't audibly noticeable and didn't disrupt the previous parts.  In the event that the punch in or out point was slightly off you had to expand the duration of the punch in and try again.  Digitally if you don't like what you did or you did it in the wrong place, you just click Undo.

The ProTools set up will likely cut our recording time in half compared to what we had to deal with previously.  We will also have much more control over compression, EQ, reverb, etc...