It's always a good "check in the box" when lead vocals on a track are complete. Today, I finished editing the main vocal track on "Out of My Mind."

Also, the acoustic guitar and bass guitar tracks received a final edit. A support electric guitar was tracked today, but I'll make every attempt to ditch it in favor of something more interesting.

What's left on this song is background vocals and some other type of miscellaneous part. The synth pad offers a nice support to the movement of the percussion track.

I've heard it said that a song is 70% vocals, 20% rhythm, and 10% stuff that no one really notices. It's that 10% that I'm working out, now.

Thanks for checking in. The album is progressing.

Happy first day of Spring! Gosh, it's about time, ain't it?

When I was building my studio last year, I looked forward to the days that were like today--tracking in an acoustically neutral room without the pressure of figuring out how to pay for it.

I only got 5 hours of work logged in, but it was a productive 5 hours.

Before my trip to Florida, I took an evening to open up all of the session files for the album. I made a chart (pictured above) to notate the progress I have made on the album, as well as what still needs to be done.

The song I focused on today was "Out of My Mind." I had debated having Dale retrack a part on a full, traditional drum kit. After tweaking a few things and listening to some reference tracks that use percussion, I've decided to develop the original idea. The song I have been listening to for inspiration and reference is Peter Gabriel's "Blood of Eden" from Us.

The first thing I noticed about the Gabriel track was that it uses pads and percussion to set a backdrop for the very present vocal. I'd like to see how far I can get with a similar approach. I tracked three "pad" tracks with the Xpand plug-in first. A "pad" is a soft, background part, often played on a synthesizer or played by a mass of string instruments. Now-a-days, synths often have "pad" settings that achieve this. I like the pads I chose; two non-moving parts and one arp pad. (Arp is short for arpeggio; or, rhythmically and individually plucked components of a single chord).

Next, I tracked the acoustic guitar. This song has some acrobatic, 16th note harmonics, so I tracked those separately. I employed a basic di/mic for the verse parts and a classic x/y system for the choruses and bridge. This allows for some movement between the sections.

Finally, I had time to track the lead vocal, recording six takes in all. Pro Tools allows for as many takes as you'd like. For me, I'm only capable of keeping track of 10 takes at a time. Between five and six is where I like to start. If something isn't right in the editing, it's always easy to set up the mic's again and punch a word or two.

The next step will be editing the performances from today, as well as looking at what has already been recorded.

Work continues on The Return of Spring. It's a real treat to be able to record in a nice space. I'm glad my wife and I built it. She also uses it for Spanish Club on Wednesday evenings.

Bass is, for me, one of the easiest things to record. Subtlety is key. My philosophy is this: record a good player on a good bass and you'll get good results. On these tunes, I'm playing for the song, so being a "good" player isn't my focus. I'm just locking in with the kick drum and playing as well as I can. The mid-70's bass I'm using has a pleasant tone.

A signal chain that works for me is starting with a tube preamp (Avalon 737) and then adding a compressor. I set the Avalon to the slightest limiting setting (10:1 with the needle moving -1 or -2 db, with fast attack and fast release). Then I set the second box to a more traditional compression setting (4:1 with medium attack, medium release and -2 to -3 db of reduction). This way, I'm limiting peaks and getting really close to the bass tone I'll most likely be mixing with. If in mixdown, more compression is needed to sustain the notes, I'll add it. But, rarely have I needed more than this.

The next step is editing the bass that hasn't been edited. I'm at the point now where I'm curious to hear how the acoustic guitars will interact with the rhythm section. So, next, I'll be tracking guitars. Then, I'll revisit the bass to hear how it all fits together.

Bass tracking is underway. The final drum edits didn't take too long. "Two Shadows" was the most difficult, but only because of its tough rhythm. "Hey Angel" and "Rip V" were really easy to edit. It seemed that the final take of each song was the best of the bunch.

The icon above is a doodle from when the edits were rendering. It has nothing to do with the album, but it kind of looks cool.

I finished bass tracking for "Don't Join the Army." At the end, the rhythm track was exciting and vibrant to play to. It'll be a joy to track guitars and vocals to this one.

"Rip V" has a basic bass track recorded, too. I'd like to edit and pocket the bass on a later day. I want to make sure I'm getting enough done each day, but not too much that it gets tedious.

I like the sound of a felt pick on the bass. It gives me the rigidity of a plastic pick, but the tone of fingers.

Stay tuned. The tracks are progressing on time. I hope to have all of the bass tracked for these tunes by the end of the week.

Drum editing is both extremely boring and tremendously exciting. The tedium of quantizing hits that are microns late or fractions early is repetitive and stifling. And yet, seeing where it all goes is almost like watching a rocket take off.

As of January 28th, 2009, over half of the drums from Saturday's drum session have been edited for further tracking. "Come Alive," "Static," "Don't Join the Army," "Nightmares," and "Two Shadows" have been combed through for best takes, quantizing, and tom editing.

Since we only did three or four whole takes for each song, there wasn't as much to go through as I am accustomed to. Less talk, more rock.

There is a certain echelon of musician that shuns technology. I've heard it in the circles and coteries I run in, "Oh, I never use Auto Tune." Or, "I would never use Beat Detective on my drum tracks." Worse still, is the notion that using these valuable, powerful production tools are some how "bad." I love technology. I use it a lot. I recognize the pandora. And, I love what it brings to the fold.

The challenge with these tools is using them and not letting them use you. I prefer natural sounding performances. Something that's a little out of time is unnatural and distracting. On the other hand, something that is perfect is also distracting. In subjective arenas, like music, perfection yields mediocrity. I like for tracks to remain human but not distractingly so. I use the tools to serve the song and the listener.

One of my favorite aspects of digital recording is waveform editing. The ability to "tab to transient" and delete information selectively does wonders for seldom played, resonant drums. Of course, I'm talking about the toms, those big drums that hang around the kit that are played mainly in transitions. Digital editing is the best gating you could ever ask for.

"Hey, Angel" and "Rip Van Winkle" are left. Those were very well played in the tracking stage, so I don't think it will be too much longer before bass tracking begins. "Two Shadows" was the most difficult to edit, but only because shuffle rhythm is natively weird.

And, we're off.

Dale came over to the studio on Saturday, January 24, 2009, for a day of drum tracking for The Return of Spring. It was a great day of music and fellowship. I think we both had a good time. Dale particularly enjoyed playing "Nightmares." When I asked if it was the song's compound time, he just said, "it was fun!"

I like the results I get from my drum tracking method. I've combed through just about every manual, book, magazine, DVD, audio recording, and website about recording drums. Everything pretty much says the same thing: if you have a good drummer play a good kit in a good room, it's hard to get a bad drum sound. So true. The only other tid bits of info that have been remotely helpful are two: 1) for more attack out of a drum (whack!) get the mic closer to the center of the drum; for more tone (boom), stick to the rim and 2) make sure your overhead mics are in phase.

With the exception of the kick drum, I had Audix dynamic mics on the rims of all drums. I'm going to have bass guitar carry the extreme low of this stuff, so I opted to use the nice hole in the front, center of the kick drum for the kick sound. Getting overhead mics in phase is pretty easy: just make sure the capsules are as close as possible and at a 90 degree angle from each other. It creates a nice stereo image of the drum set.


We started off the day by getting the room set up and mics in place. I hear you snoring. I know, boring stuff. Once we were ready, we started with "Hey, Angel," a popular song from the Mark & Mike show. For all of the songs, I had some basic ideas mapped out. My understanding of rhythm will never be as sophisticated as an accomplished percussionist's is. So, I deferred a lot of things like fills and such to him. Having basic kick and snare patterns were helpful because they helped inform where the bass guitar would hit. I'm glad I took the time to map that out. We did about four takes of the song, the last one being the best.

The day continued. We progressed through the songs quickly and deliberately, recording never more than four takes for a song. The pre-production helped speed up the process considerably. Again, it's always worth spending some time with a song before hand. We recorded drums for "Static" and "Nightmares."

Just as it's never a good idea to use the same guitar through a whole album, I don't like to use the same snare drum throughout a recording session. We changed out the snare after three songs. "Two Shadows" was probably the most difficult of the songs to track, but only because it's in 12/8 meter. I thought the snare was just landing a 32nd note out of place. No, it's a weird shuffle rhythm in 12/8. That will be helpful when editing the song. Gotta change the meter on the grid.

The biggest surprise for me was the translation of "Come Alive" from a drum machine part to a walking, human rhythm. I love what Dale did for this song. It's amazing how much more exciting real drums are; for me, there's really no comparison.

For the last two songs, I wanted to change things up a bit. Dale played "hot rods," or splintered drum sticks, on "Rip Van Winkle." These are typically used for when the drummer is asked to play "quieter," but they do offer a unique timbre to a drum kit. The best commercial example I can think of is the drums on Oasis' masterpiece "Wonderwall." That drum fill on the break after the first chorus is nothing but hot rods. Awesome. It added a new dimension to the kit we used throughout the day.

We had time for one more tune at the end of the day so we snuck in "Don't Join the Army." For this song, we changed up the sticks, but instead of hot rods, we used a frayed plastic stick and what looked like an extremely small broomstick. I like that we retained the intensity of a full drum set, but allowed space for an acoustic guitar in the future.

The next step in all of this is combing through the drum takes and picking the best parts. Pro Tools 8 makes compositing much faster, so I look forward to saving time here. I started on "Come Alive" yesterday in the last few minutes of the day. I hope to be ready for bass overdubs by the beginning of February.

Drumming takes up a lot of time, tracks, and sonic space. It's important to know what you're getting into when you're getting into it. I've found a method that works for me.

Stay tuned!

Singing through a song, with its metronome playing, is probably the best way to make sure a song is arriving at the right tempo. I fully expected "Two Shadows" to clock in faster than it did. "Frogs" by Failure inspired the song. I envisioned the track sounding something like that. Over the last two years, as "Shadows" has become a staple in our acoustic duo shows, it seems to have naturally slowed down. I pushed it a bit, still, just for excitement value. When playing with the click track, it felt good. I'm gonna roll with a tempo of 135 beats per minute for this one.

"Come Alive" is a green tune. It's only been played live once. And, I haven't nailed all of the lyric changes, yet. Still, there's something I really like about the demo of it that appeared in 2007. I'm going to use it's native tempo of 155, as well as the basic midi'ed drum pattern as a reference. I anticipate that the album will come out swingin'. I guess that's good, seeing as how spring sometimes comes in like a lion.

"Nightmares" has seemed too slow since I initially clocked it. I played along with it today at an adjusted tempo of 145 bpm. Now, it swings and rocks just right. All of the other tunes seem to be working. Tomorrow, I'll give the scratch tracks a final listen. I'll also need to set up the room for drum tracking. I have a basic "drummer's" template saved, which saves a lot of time when jumping from session to session.

I'm looking forward to Saturday. Drum day is probably my favorite day in the studio. There's so much to do and so much to capture.

In some free time today, I was able to lay down click tracks for "Static" and a forgotten song, "Don't Join the Army." Holly was listening to "Army" a few days ago on her iPod. As the song filled the living room, I realized it had fallen through the cracks. How could I have forgotten that one?

"Army" was one of the first songs I wrote when I returned to the idea of doing a seasoned theme solo album. Did you know that The Promise of Summer was originally supposed to be The Return of Spring? Songs like "Rusted Radio," "She Alone," and "Don't Fade Away" were coming out a little more "rockin'" than I had anticipated. So, we shifted focus. "Army" was left behind.

"Don't Join the Army" is a double edged sword. On one hand, it has an inherently offensive superficiality to it. On the other hand, it's one of the most honest songs I've ever written. It's a snapshot of my life that I cherish. It should be recorded. I'll sort out the details later. Considering what people might think about a song is creatively damaging. Can't do that.

Although, I don't know that I'll get to it in this round. I made a click track and banged out a basic drum pattern idea for it.

"Static" came together really well. It's exciting with just a click, kick & snare pattern, and scratch mandolin. I compared the tempo of "Static" to ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky," one of the most perfectly crafted recordings I can think of. Lynne's tempo, arrangement, and production is exciting every time I hear it.

I'm noticing that most of the songs are clocking in a bit short, with just about everything at 3:30 or under. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. I gotta remember that it's OK for a song to last four minutes...as song should be as long as it needs to be.

After completing some mix revisions for Serotonen, a new band from New York that I've been working with since August of 2008, I had some spare time to complete another click track for an upcoming song.

"Nightmares" is a complex tune. It changes from compound time (5/4) to standard time fairly regularly. This makes for some craziness when setting a grid. I'm used to the new interface in Pro Tools 8, so it wasn't too hard.

I always liked the tempo of Pearl Jam's "Last Exit," the song that kicks of their third album Vitalogy. In fact, I remember wanting to write a song like "Last Exit" after I heard it for the first time. I guess that's where "Nightmares" came from. That, and a 12 hour layover in Pittsburgh in March of 1995. Long story. Not really a particularly good one either. Doesn't even have a happy ending. I did get a fair song out of it, though.

I clocked "Last Exit" at 141, give or take a few beats per minute. I have a specific drum beat in mind for this song, so I mapped that out quickly. The chorus has always been a bit of a question mark for me. I tried some basic ideas that I liked. I haven't settled on fills yet, but I have a basic kick and snare pattern than builds as each new chorus arrives. This will help grow the intensity as the song progresses. I think I'm going to leave a lot of the brass up to Dale on this one.

I'll need to revisit some of the details later. It seems like the song needs an hour or so of time, just to develop the patterns a little more.

Stay tuned.

I spent a few hours today writing click tracks and basic drum arrangements for "Hey, Angel" and "Rip Van Winkle." "3308," one of my new songs, had a less esoteric alternate title before its completion. It's original demo file was named "Rip Van Winkle." I like that name a lot better.

The purpose of a click track is to establish a guide tempo for rhythm track musicians. This is usually a drummer and bass player, but sometimes an entire band can record guide tracks at once. On some sessions, the click is nothing short of an emperor, a tyrant of rhythm that cannot be reasoned with or altered. On other sessions, the click is a suggested guide. I like to take a heavy rhythmic guide from the click. But, when it comes down to feel vs. click, I err on the side of feel.

The tempo of a song is key. If a song is too slow, it's often perceived as boring or lazy. If it's too fast, it seems hyper and unpolished.

For "Hey, Angel," I listened to three of our live recordings of the song. The tempos on those recordings ran from between 92 beats per minute (bpm) and 95 bpm. Two of the three commercial samples I referenced were much faster than that: "Sour Girl" by STP clocking in at 105 and "Off He Goes" by Pearl Jam measuring 100 bpm. "Miracle" by Foo Fighters seemed at about 95. I opted to speed the click for this recording up to 97. When I played to it, I could get all the words in with ease but it didn't seemed rushed. Every song is different, but I think it was a good idea to measure the tempo against commercial tunes.

"Rip Van Winkle" had its native demo tempo set to 106. I had a clocking problem when I tracked the demo. The Focusrite Octopre, an 8 channel input for my rig, requires an "optical" clock source when it's being used. This is just fine if the sample rates for the Pro Tools session and the sample rate on the Octopre are the same. If there's a discrepancy, the track will not playback at the proper speed when the optical source is ejected.

I liked my performance on the demo so much that I just sped it up to be in the right key. The only artifact from this was that the tempo was no longer exactly 106. It generated an imperceptible remainder of 0.05 beats per minute. The smallest deviations make midi tracks arrive at the wrong time after a minute or so of being "off" by 0.05 bpm. It was easy to just change the session tempo to 106.05. As a result, the final version will have the oddity of being 106.05 in tempo. I guess that's OK, with the song being called "Rip Van Winkle," and all...

I like to suggest kick and snare patterns to my session drummers. Dale is great with coming up with parts of his own, as well as tweaking the ideas I come up with. If I write the variations between sections the way I hear them, it makes the session drummer's job easier. I don't want to tie his hands, though. I always like to see what he can come up with.

With both songs, I wrote in midi drum parts, playing through the Digidesign Strike program. I like the suggested variations. I'm eager to hear what Dale comes up on these two songs.

Hopefully, I'll have some free time next week to get the other four songs clicked and mapped out.

Now that the studio is broken in, I've decided to return to a project that's long over due: The Return of Spring.

I started this record in the summer of 2007. I quickly abandoned the recording once in became clear how much work construction was going to be. There's a lot of "sweat equity" in that place. I built all of it, with the exception of the framing, the acoustic treatments, and the hanging of the doors (which, is a surprisingly difficult skill).

Dale Baker, the drummer with whom I began the project, will return on Saturday, January 24th for some basic tracking. I'm excited to get back to recording from the songwriter's perspective.

Today, after a writing session, I sat on the studio couch and looked at my list of songs. I've narrowed it down to 15. I'll end up cutting four; my other "season" albums each have eleven songs on them. This one will be no different.

On the 24th, we'll lay down basic tracks for five songs: "Nightmares," "Hey, Angel," "Two Shadows," "Static," and "Come Alive." I have an extra song, "3308," that we'll track if there's time. I'll edit the tracks later.

"Nightmares" harkens back to the early 90's. I've had this song sitting around for over ten years. It's never made it to an album, probably for the reason that it always seemed like the acoustic counterpart to "October," from The Lessons of Autumn. I'm excited to give this song a proper place in my catalog. It has an intro piece that will be recorded separately.

"Hey, Angel" and "Two Shadows" have been live favorites at the Mark & Mike shows of late. I hope Mark will want to contribute his parts to these tracks.

"Static" appears on the Live at the Evening Muse DVD/CD. For this recording, I'm going to attempt a hybrid of the original demo (which tries hard to be "Mr. Blue Sky" but falls short) and the mandolin version that went over so well at that show.

"Come Alive" and "3308" are two newer songs that I debuted at the Deep South show last month. They went over well. I'm eager to record these green pieces.

I plan to record "April Moon" and "Jenny" which both appeared on the Muse album. I'd like to try some different instrumentation on these; strings or horns come to mind as a fun possibility.

The six songs that began the project are also going to be re-visited--"Water & Wine," "The Great Divide," "Out of My Mind," "The Original Pullman Palace Car Dream," "Focus," and "Falling in Love Too Fast."

So, if all goes as planned, look forward to hearing this record sometime later this year. I'm excited to share this news. Stay tuned!

Mike records bass and vocals on a song for his upcoming album, The Return of Spring. Read More...