Month: August 2018

  • Last Night’s View From The Drum Throne

    The light wasn’t great, but here’s looking out from behind the kit at Dark Satellites’ session last night.

    We’ve been working on recording a couple of instrumental pieces to 4-track tape for a documentary soundtrack project.  Drew’s garage at the new place is slowly transforming into studio space.  Done: clean, paint, move some gear.  To-do: HVAC (today), more gear, sound treatment.  For the purposes of Minutemen-style punk, rocking with the garage door open in the heat has worked OK, cicadas and all.

    Cole has been at the sessions of course, but was grabbing a beer or something when I took the picture.

  • Scott finished

    all the recording he needed to do in Lawrence on Sunday.  There may be a few synth, percussion, etc. things done in Syracuse and added in to the sessions.  That’s four years of annual summer recording trips, if you’re counting.

    h&s has been my top free time priority since October 19, when I set up mics for guitars.  I haven’t worked on it exclusively, of course, but it always came first in my mind and on my to-do list if there was anything to be done on it.  That was a result of working backwards from wanting to finish Scott’s tracking this summer, which meant getting my vocals done ahead of that, which meant getting guitars and bass and some keys done ahead of that.

    While there’s plenty of work left, it’s good to set that weight aside and work on whatever I feel like working on.

    For the past week that’s been figuring out how to make synths do Kevin Shields-like pitch bends (only down and back, not both up and down from the un-bent note(s)).  I figured it out on the MS-20, using a diode alligator-clipped in to the triangle-shaped modulation signal.  I think I know, but haven’t tested, how to do it polyphonically using the MS-20 as a control voltage source for the Electro-Harmonix PitchFork pedal.  I could also program a patch in the Micron to do it.  It would be nice to do it all analog (the PitchFork and Micron are digital) but there are very few polysynths with patch points for such things.