THE MAKING OF NEW BEST FRIENDS

February 19, 2008

so i just got back from recording the album, and i felt like i should write about it a little, since i didnt have a chance while i was up there.  the experience as a whole was pretty sweet.  sapone’s studio was super unintimidating and was perfect for the way we were doing everything.  it definitely wouldve sucked being in some huge multimillion dollar studio, especially when it was just me and sapone there working.

first thing we did was drums.  anthony did these ridic fast.  he knew his parts really well and is just great at drums, so had almost everything done in 2 days.  that is thouroughly outrageous.

next, we did guitar.  usually bass would come second, but we decided that this was gonna be a total guitar record, so we wanted to hear what the guitars would be doing before we put bass on it.  it ended up being real cool cause it let us do more interesting things with bass besides jsut playing the basic notes.  we started with some of hte more important songs (aka potential singles), and they sounded pretty sweet.  one of my favorite things about the guitar on the record is that virtually every guitar part is a different combination of amp, effects, and guitar.  we didnt just have one set up for clean parts, one for heavy, etc, and i think that makes it sound a lot more interesting.

this is a picture of me and my gibson nighthawk aka black bean.  we used this guitar for most of the heavier parts, as wel as some of the cleanies.  it  has 3 different kinds of pickups, which gave us a lot of options.

we used this marshall jmp for a few parts, and used this speaker cabinet for basically everything.  the mics are a shure sm7 (we used one of these on probably every guitar and bass o nthe record) and a sennheiser 421.  sometimes we used a nady ribbon mic on there too, or a different shure.  for most of the clean geetars we used an old fender jazzmaster, as well as an old hofner, a guild brian may, and maybe something else i cant remember.

we also used a lot of small combo amps, like the ones above.  on the top left is an old fender champ, which sounded incredible, but we only got to use it on one song cause then it blew up (we had the same fate with a vox ac50 head).  the vox brian may on the top right was used for some lead parts, and the bottom left cambridge was used for some cleans on “insulated."  we also used a couple fender pro jr’s on some parts.

we used a bunch of effects.  the POG is an octave generator that was super sweet and got a surprising amount of use, along with the memory man.  sapone got the holy stain and that epiphone valve jr halfway through, and they both got a lot of use after that.  both are very cool.  this picture looks like an ad for electro-harmonix.  we used a bunch of other pedals, especially a RAT distortion, some chorus, and my homemade compressor pedal even got used for one part.

for acoustics, we mostly used this one awesome taylor that belonged to brandnew, but we also used my fender for a couple parts, as well as a cool martin and this incredible super old gibson.  we did bass in between guitar stuff.  we used this cool fender jazz bass i borrowed from bryan whiteman of emanuel, and almost always used a sweetass ampeg fliptop.  on a couple things we used an ashdown bass magniflier instead.  of course we used the sm7 on it.

then it was time for vocals, but i was sick.  i was super congested and tried like 10 different medicines, but i think that just made it worse.  so we had to do some other boring stuff while we waited for me to get better, and finall yafter a few days it started clearing up.  we used the sm7 for most of the quiet parts, and this cool gefell tube mic for the other stuff.

this was probably the hardest part, since it would take a lot out of me singing stuff over and over and over.  after a few days, we started doing some louder/yelly parts and i basically killed my voice, which sucked.  we did some quiet parts after that though, and it actually had a pretty cool vibe since my voice was shot.  by this time, me and sapone were getting pretty burnt out.  it had been three 60 hour weeks of just me and him working, and it was starting to take its toll on us.  i had a hard time getting too excited about things, and was probly just grumpy most of the time, but it worked out fine.  we got everything done sooner than we had planned, which was very cool.  i dont know if ive ever heard of an album taking less time than expected.  so i came back to nc, and sapone starts mixing today.  i cant wait to hear it, the rough mixes are sounding awesome. i hope this wasnt boring.