Studio Diary 1

Current mood: artistic

well, here i am in Roseto, Pennsylvania preparing to record my EP. I arrived here on the evening of Saturday May 7 via rental car. It was a pleasant drive up from Boston. Anyway, so far things have been going really well. For those that don’t know what’s going on, I recently took time off work so that I could come down here to record my EP before I start summer classes May 24. I’m staying at my friend Allen’s for the duration of the recording. He co-produced the last two songs that I did, and in combination with the tracks that I complete here in the following weeks, I will release a 5 song EP on Light In The Dark Records, which is Allen’s independent label. So I’m pretty stoked about that. Anyway, there has been a lot of uncertainty the past few days as to what songs I would be doing, and how they would be arranged, because I literally came down here with more or less a vague idea of what i wanted to accomplish. Without any complete lyrics or arrangements, and just scattered ideas for songs, I couldn’t help but feel a little nervous. But over the past couple of days, things have really started to come together nicely. After doing some serious brainstorming, some rehearsing with Josh (who played drums on my last recording) and getting some constructive feedback from Allen, I now have 3 songs that are ready to be recorded. Anything can change with drop of a hat, but as of right now, I’m satisfied with the current results. Song No. 1 is a total catchy pop song about moving to the west coast. Song No. 2 is a really energetic track, that is quite simple harmonically, but there’s a lot of development within the chord structure that keeps it interesting. And it’s going to have a rippin’ solo but more on that later. Song No. 3 will be a very introspective piano track that will hopefully end up sounding somewhat magical. We start recording drums tomorrow, so hopefully things go well. I still have plenty of writing to do, but I will make an effort to keep an update of progress. It’s definitely new to me to go straight into production unsure of what to expect and without complete songs. I’m so used to demo-ing everything in its entirety and then repeating the process with a few revisions. But this time, a lot of is based on spontaneity. It’s kind of exciting. In other news, I got the new Weezer today, and it rocks. Worth the wait. Oh, and happy B-day to JZ. Wow that was a long post.