Recording update

Yesterday, I went over to our piano player Herb's place to record keyboard parts for 5 songs.

So far on this album, we have recorded Herb's parts in many assorted ways. For "Imaginary Girlfriend," the whole band played live in Herb's living room and he played his own personal piano (technically, the session where we recorded the song was for this radio show [which you can download], but the recording on the album is taken from a different source). For many of the band songs on Fustercluck!!!, like "(The Shame About) Manboobs" and "Hey 2-Eyes," we recorded Herb separately, listening to a rough mix of the existing songs and playing on the piano at Brooklyn Tea Party, engineered by Dan Costello. For six of the songs, the whole band went into a studio in Brooklyn and played live while I sang; for those songs, Herb played a keyboard about 2 feet from our drummer Doug Johnson whacking the hell out of those skins. I think it was a little hard to concentrate at times.

So yesterday we tried something that I hope will work out okay. We essentially did what we had done at the Brooklyn Tea Party, with Herb taking the existing rough mix and overdubbing his piano part onto it. The difference today was that we just used Herb's own keyboard. Herb has his keyboard hooked up to his computer through an M box, and we just recorded the sound of it in Garageband. I'm gonna give the files to our producer Major Matt tomorrow, and hopefully they will blend in nicely.

The recording session was nice for me, because it was pretty much a stress-free situation. I wasn't paying for recording time, so we could take all the necessary time to get the parts done right, and Herb did a great job without having to leave his practice room.

And if Matt agrees that these takes are good, then we are oh-so-very-very-very-close to getting this monster done. Just a handful of more overdubs, a bunch of mixing, and mastering, then the recordings are done! Then that'll leave cover design and CD replication... the EXCITING stuff (ha ha).

My hope now is to have this out in the world before the end of October. I talked to Brook Pridemore about having a CD release show at the Brooklyn Tea Party (his apartment), but he said they probably wouldn't be able to host a show 'til December... It makes me wonder whether I should drag my feet until then or just release the album without fanfare once it's ready and then have the party later whenever it's feasible. Is anybody reading this? Do you have an opinion? Please provide it below.