Greg at the controls, recording a bass track.

Well, after a year of talking about it, Studio Weekend finally happened and we got a few tracks recorded to works in progress and a few new live sounding scratch songs recorded.  The latter are pretty rough, as yours truly still doesn’t know his equipment and software as well as he should.  But, I’ll mix what we got and post it, just under the DEMO category. Who knows, maybe someday they’ll sell as bootlegs.

Bootlegs.  Those used to be very cool underground concert recordings.  Now they’re sanctioned by the artists and record companies alike, and sold for royalties.

Greg recording his bass track with Lon at the helm.

But back to the studio.  The first two pics have Reg (Greg) recording bass to “Burnin My Bridges.”  The last time he was in studio, we tracked the bass to Feet Back on the Ground.  Then, the bass direct didn’t have much gain at line input so we had to use a line out from the amp head.  That was a  little noisy but it ended up working pretty well.

This time, the bass sounded great out of the gate.  The bass is different, and so is all the studio recording hardware and software.  We’ll still tweak the track in the mix of course, but it’s a really good sound – much better still than any sampled basses in the library, and I have some good ones

John Lang, added a much needed track to Mallory.

John Lang there  is in Steel Corner, as I just named it.  It’s the part of the living room that normally has a chair. The picture on the wall is 100+ years old, and I was supposed to get it appraised to see if it’s worth restoring.  It’s not an original, and if I remember correctly, they put it behind glass way back when and now there is mold.  Ask Greg, he’ll tell you the whole story. Some people think its the Mona Lisa, but she never had a hat like that.

But back to John, if you never heard him play, or if you don’t think you like pedal steel – then he’ll convert you in a second,  I have to record lead guitar and mandolin on the tune, then mix it.  Will have it up for download, hopefully in not too long.

Next we attempted to work out a couple of Route 66 songs with our extra musicians but it proved a little to time consuming so soon we were down to the core 3.

Rehearsal

After two pretty good takes of a couple R66 standards, I discovered I hadn’t hit the record button.

Chris: “With great intelligence comes great responsibilty”

Me: “And great fuck-ups”

Dave and Chris getting ready to record.

So we did get a pretty good live sounding take of  “Runaway Train,” a Route 66 original.  Here’s the song, somewhat mixed I guess, remember it’s rough. (Click the arrow on the mini player below to listen)

Then we were left with just Dave and me to record a few of our Duo songs, and Sam helped out with some percussion.  Those aren’t mixed yet, I’ll have to give them another listen or two first to figure out what to do with them. Enjoy!

Then came blogs. And jumping over the whole evolution of blogging, we now have access to sophisticated and free blogging applications and inexpensive or free hosting. While blogs are really meant for blogging, I’m calling them out-of-the-box websites for the rest of us. They are easy to set up, customize and maintain. Case in point – the MoneyPit.

And even more than just having a website, we are now in the world of Web 2.0, syndication, and aggregate content. Just like that. So instead of competing with the MySpaces, YouTubes and Photobuckets, we can now collect and group pertinent content that’s already been published. Other than ease of use, it helps anyone who wants more exposure to be, well, more exposed.

So that’s what this blogsite is about – I have a few pages to basically contain pointers to other places. For example, the Groups and People pages (will) contain maybe a thumbnail photo and short summary, but more important, those pages will link out to your MySpace pages, websites or other internet locales. I also have a nice gig calendar that’s easy to update and maintain. In addition to all that, I may do some actual blogging touching on subjects like music, recording or local event reviews. Special events will be posted as an actual blog post which means it will get sent out in the email newsletter. To get these updates, plus the occasional blog article, enter your email addy in the box to the right and hit the Subscribe button. Questions, comments or ideas – leave a comment by clicking the Comments link just below this article, or email me with the email link in the subscription form.