My band is going in to the studio in April. We’re not a start up enterprise anymore; we’ve been playing together for almost two years now, so we’re of the opinion that all this time and focus should show. So we’ve been taking some added steps to insure success.
For starters, once we realized the band was pretty solid it drew back all the attention on the singing because ultimately that’s going to be the focus. And if your band’s name actually starts with the full name of the lead singer, well, even more so. So we started a looong search for a vocal coach which ended up with us finding this lady. Here I cut this part of the story short because we just engaged with Emily and I don’t have enough to report other than I’m excited about this. The approach is geared to exactly what we are doing: help us with our harmonies and phrasing on these songs of ours. This simple request is harder to find than you might think.
We also know which studio we are going in to and we know the set up. We know that while we can record live, we will have to wear headphones and we won’t be in the same room with all our gear.
In a way, this is a blessing for me since I’ve wanted to convince my band to rehearse using headphones so we could get improved recordings in our own studio. I went online to purchase a headphone amplifier/distributor and a couple more headphones. Here’s a shout out to Sweetwater Sound because this stuff was amazingly affordable. I hope to upload something for you from our own efforts because this has been very successful. I am equally excited about doing further recording at Studio 312 (our own studio) as I am about going in to Carter Co Recordings.
So. Our approach now to rehearsal from now until we are set to record mid-April is to focus on the six songs we plan to record. Play/record a bit with amps. And then play/record sans amps with headphones. I’m being very critical of all our bad breaks. And also of tone problems with guitars etc.
I hope this proves fruitful. Identifying issues is one thing. Successfully fixing them may be another.
And April could come way too soon.
