Sunday, the bandmates and I met at 9:10am. This is not bad considering a planned start time of 9:00am, and the fact that we're talking about musicians here… I've not known many musicians who were morning people. I don't think it would be unfair to say that it's hard to get them to even crack a smile at 9am on a Sunday morning, let alone show up for a recording session.

(Actually, only the other guitarist and I, who have apparently become the whip-crackers in the group, showed up on time; the other two were about an hour late.)

So, we set up the drums and bass, mic'd them and started recording (bass and drums only). We got about one song down when it was time to break for lunch, so we ambled up to Moe's and opted for a late breakfast, obtaining more bang for our food dollars.

In the afternoon we recorded 5 more songs for a total of 6 on the day, which was more than we had hoped for. Because we have equipment limitations and are not working in a $40,000 studio, we couldn't provide guitars or vocals to cue the guys, so we had to do a lot of hand signals and mouth-counting so that the drummer would know what part of the song he was in. After about 4 hours of this, everyone got understandably tired, and each song required progressively more takes.

Of concern is the fact that we seem to be having trouble getting the "other two" guys to squeeze in sessions, and we have three weeks until our drummer goes under the knife and out of commission. Yikes.

I've worked out what I think is a good track order now, but it still needs to be discussed with the guitarist. I don't think it's far off from what he'll want though, since a lot of it is based on his suggestions.

Last night we met up again, this time without the bass player, who mysteriously couldn't make it, and ironed out the arrangements for four more songs. We're supposed to record them (drums and bass) Friday, but Drummer has gone and double-booked himself, so we may have to postpone. Argh. Rhythm section guys – whaddaya gonna do wif 'em? :-)

Oh, and the Sunday session? It turns out that because we recorded at the highest quality allowed by the digital machine, we cannot use the built-in EQ on those songs. We'll have to convert the recordings to a lower quality first, or bounce them to an external effect unit. Grrr. See what bad documentation does? The only mention of this limitation appears deep in the digital deck's manual in parentheses!

Wow, do I ever sound like a music technology geek… oops…

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