Today's recording project(s) - I'll Find You Hiding / Through the Years

Today was a good music day... I spent the morning jamming around with some friends, worked on a couple new song concepts in the afternoon, and spent most of the evening recording final tracks and mixing songs down.

Through the Years takes the cake for both "newest composition" and "least like anything else we've written or recorded": "Newest" in that all the music and lyrics have been composed during the past month (compared to many of the songs that we've been playing in one form or another for a couple of years); "least like anything else" in that the song is all acoustic, mostly down-tuned 12-string with a couple 6-string tracks added for additional texture.

The second song is I'll Find You Hiding, which is a tune we've been jamming around on with Necessary Distraction for just over a year now. This is probably one of the more "odd" songs we've got... rather dark & droning compared to everything else we've written & recorded recently. (I think I wrote the music after re-discovering Heart's Mistral Wind.) The wide-open nature lends itself to layering of different textures, so there are probably more audio tracks in this song (and more gratuitous use of effects like phaser & delay & reverb) than anything else we've done. Oddly enough, the guitar solo was a scratch track that I ended up liking more than any of the "official" takes that followed.

Through the Years:
- "Lead" acoustic guitar - Guild F47M-CE mic'd with Kel Audio HM-1 and Audio Technica AT2020 condensers into Presonus DigiMax FS

I'll Find You Hiding:
- Left rhythm guitar - G&L ASAT Classic into Egnater JTM45 head
- Right rhythm guitar - PRS McCarty Korina into Hughes & Kettner Edition Tube 20 combo
- Lead guitar - PRS McCarty Korina into Hughes & Kettner Edition Tube 20 combo
- Slide guitar - Hamer Eclipse into Mesa Recto preamp + Randall RT2/50 power amp
- other "texture" guitar - Ernie Ball JP7 into Mesa Recto preamp + Randall RT2/50 power amp
- All of the above - through V30-loaded Randall R212C cabinet mic'd with Cascade Fat Head ribbon and Blue "The Ball" dynamic into Presonus DigiMax FS

Common gear:
- Acoustic guitar - Takamine EF-385 12-string mic'd with Kel Audio HM-1 and Audio Technica AT2020 condensers into Presonus DigiMax FS
- Bass guitar - G&L Tribute L-2500 direct into Line 6 GearBox
- Vocals - Studio Projects C1 condenser into DigiMax FS
- Drums - Drums on Demand

As of now, we've got nine songs complete, one more song that's 90% complete, and a handful of concepts in the hopper... hopefully we'll get two or three of those concepts finished by the end of the year.

--B