The percs of the job

Ben came by and worked on adding some drums to the demos for Teeny Crush, How to Grow Up, So Lonely and Rusty Nail. We got through a quick set-up of the mics (snare, kick, rack, floor, two overheads, and an extra mic on the underside of the snare) and got good reference takes of what he's been playing on these songs in the live setting.

Then we messed around a little bit with layering a drum beat with a percussion beat, just to see what we could accomplish. We didn't get a groove that was particularly inspiring, but I was happy with tones and on Thursday we'll work on some more beat ideas. The hope is to build up a little bit of a library of grooves that we can use for inspiration when starting some of the upcoming demos.

Post #100! Rockenspiel!

We spent all of tonight working on The Running Hurts. We recut the guitar to match the new arrangement, added vocals and bass, and laid down a glockenspiel part.

The glock sounds pretty and nice, but I think we're going to end up replacing with something more gritty and nasty.

More demos

Adding to the list, we've been working on cleaning up and deciphering and rebuilding the demos for two new songs: Losing Team and The Running Hurts.

Also, How to Grow Up, Teeny Crush, Rusty Nail and So Lonely have made their live debuts and we've learned a lot about the songs and tweaked arrangements. Sometimes the things you do in the studio feel too long or too short or strange in other ways. Playing them live sorts out a lot of that kind of stuff and gives you a better sense of the essence of the song.

More work tonight on demos.

Here's the updated list:

Newest Sketches
Losing Team
The Running Hurts
Give a Damn
Day to Day
Little Gun

More developed
Dry Season
How to Grow Up
Teeny Crush
So Lonely
Rusty Nail

Well developed
Nestles at Noon
Stop to Slow Down
Blow Your Kisses
Missing Elvis
For the Kids
No Branches

Soon to be rescued from recordings of old rehearsals
Twinkle Toes

Fri / Sat Sessions

Much time was spent last night, during a long session, crafting a drum machine track for How to Grow Up. It came out really well for a scratch guide track and we recut the guitar so that it would line up a little better.

We also recut the guitar for Dry Season to make sense with the sculpting we've done to the arrangement. Once we had that cooking, I added bass to the song -- a combination of finger-style through the bulk of the song and bowed bass on the ending.

Today I went over to the studio on my own and spent most of the day working on bass parts for Rusty Nail and How to Grow Up. Both songs went well and didn't take long.

After I had bass tracks, I started messing around with other ideas on Rusty Nail, adding some very minimal ukulele and banjo parts on a couple sections and then percussion (including wacking on a tamborine that was sitting on top of a conga) and a tiny bit of glockenspiel.

Thanks to Dan Richardson, who loaned us his unused glock. It just may end up being the star of the record. It's only made an appearance on Rusty Nail and No Branches so far, but that hasn't been for lack of trying.

Hoo-RAH

It's been a productive week at Brave Tiger. Dave and I worked together Monday and Wednesday and I put in a night alone in the studio on Tuesday.

We identified some more of Dave's sketches that sparked our interest and marked them as songs we want to develop. On Tuesday I worked on fleshing out How to Grow Up and Dry Season, tweaking arrangements and sections and cleaning things up a bit. Tonight we did even more of that, redoing some sketch guitar and vocal parts and shuffling the arrangements around a bit.

Things are feeling pretty good. We also listened back to Teeny Crush tonight after not hearing it for a few weeks. I liked it. On Teeny Crush I had played a little bit of conga, which explains the photo up at the top of this post. Let's just say I'm not, in the least, a percussionist but against all odds things turned out well.

Here's the list of the all the songs in the hopper now:

Newest Sketches
Give a Damn
Day to Day
Dry Season
How to Grow Up
Little Gun

Slightly more developed
Teeny Crush
So Lonely (perhaps called Only Maybe)
Rusty Nail

Well developed
Nestles at Noon
Stop to Slow Down
Blow Your Kisses
Missing Elvis
For the Kids
No Branches

Soon to be rescued from recordings of old rehearsals
Twinkle Toes

That's 15 song sketches, nine of which have a pretty good demo version going on right now. I think that deserves a windmill ...

Thanks, Dave ...

Rusty Nail

We spent a bunch of time Monday night working on Rusty Nail. Essentially, we had three or four sections that needed to be turned into a song, so we spent time moving things around and figuring out what worked for an arrangement.

It went very smoothly and we were able to get at something that was pretty happening in a relatively short amount of time, especially compared to Teeny Crush. Arranging Teeny Crush was like getting teeth pulled, except that instead of novacaine you get a cinder block smacked against your head. Rusty Nail went much better than that.

The only thing we need to sort out at this point is whether there's a better chorus yet to be written and whether the final verse should be twice as long as we have it right now. I'm leaning towards thinking that, yes, it should be twice as long but we'll see what happens.

Just to recap, here's the list of songs we've got in the demo-stages right now:

Blow Your Kisses
Stop to Slow Down
Missing Elvis
For the Kids
No Branches
Teeny Crush
So Lonely
Rusty Nail

Also, we have a couple aborted attempts at starting a demo for Nestles at Noon. That will need to be revisited soon. And there are also a couple others that Dave has sketched out that need some sorting and shuffling.

Last night I put in some more time on accordian for So Lonely. I think I made some progress.

Saturday session

Got a rare Saturday session in today, and spend it with Dave refining the demos for both Teeny Crush and So Lonely. We cut new guitar parts, to unify the arrangements. I added bass to Teeny Crush. Dave added harmonica to So Lonely. Dave did clean vocal passes on both songs, and a harmony on So Lonely.

Then, I pulled out the accordian and messed around with an idea for So Lonely.

I didn't get what I would consider final parts, but I sketched out some ideas that, after some refining, will probably sound kind of cool. The accordian adds a nice depth and blends really well with both the harmonica and the glockenspiel.

Then, listening back with accordian in place we got the idea for a quick strummed part to lay in over the chorus. Dave pulled out the bouzouki and we worked at that for a while. We didn't nail the part, but we got the idea down anyway, and it's pretty swell.

I think we've gotten to the point with these two demos where we need to put these tracks away for a few weeks. This week we plan to start working up Rusty Nail and one other whose name I'm blanking on.

So Lonely / Teeny Crush

We've continued working on hashing out the arrangements of both So Lonely and Teeny Crush. Last night we spent a good long time moving parts around on Teeny Crush, trying to figure out what gave it the best flow. By the end of it all I think we had something that was working well.

For So Lonely, we played through it live to see how it felt. Repeating the new bridge again as the outro seemed to wrap the song up.

Getting ready to start rebuilding from the bottom up again.