Production Notes

Hey everyone.  Sorry again for the late production update. As I mentioned, I’ve been out of town, so it’s been hard to find wi-fi and/or cell coverage.  We were really pressed for time when we were trying to finish the album, so I didn’t have any spare moments to devote to blog updates. I just got back in town tonight.

Before I lose those of you with few spare moments yourselves, be sure to check out the new production photos I added to the album on the Photos page.

So here’s what happened:

It took us two huge recording sessions to finish all the tracking for the Christmas EP.  Last week, we moved all my recording gear over to Joe’s house to track drums and everything else. We recorded for about 12 hours that day. Then, we wanted to continue making progress with all the tracking, but my family took an impromptu trip to South GA, so I was unavailable for a day or so in between. Long story short, it came down to Sunday night, and I was leaving for another family trip to Pennsylvania at 4:00 AM Monday morning.

We had to accomplish the impossible: track remaining electric guitars and bass for Snow/Heat Miser (which was a lot… five tracks total), vocals (including BGVs) for Snow/Heat Miser and Emmanuel, redub melodica for Santa Claus Comin to Town, AND produce the whole album in ONE NIGHT… and I hadn’t even packed my bags for my six-day trip yet. It was indeed impossible. We didn’t pull it off.

But we DID finish tracking everything, which was the important part.  Joe and I worked until about 3 AM editing takes and whatnot, but we knew there was no way we’d even finish the drum plugin chains before I had to leave. Finally, I hit the road for PA Monday morning with my family, and I brought my hard drive along for the ride. I sculpted tracks for about 5 hours of the 13-hour drive up North.

At Gram and Grandfather’s house, there is no Wi-Fi or T-Mobile cell coverage, so I found myself suddenly disconnected from the rest of the world, including the eager-for-updates Joe Brim. I have no problem taking a break from the internet for a week, but when you’re trying to post your album online for others to download, an internet connection is especially important.

In between socializing with family, I snuck upstairs and produced like a madman. About a day later, I had finished the mixes as much as I could, but time was out. I have to say I’m not 100% satisfied with the mixes, but it was the best I could do with the time I had. Either way, it was an incredibly fun and educational experience for me. We tried so many things on this project that I had never done before. For instance, I never had the capability to track real drums before I upgraded my rig. To mic Joe’s kit, we recorded 8 mics simultaneously. That was new.

For those of you who are interested in production or just desire some behind-the-scenes information about the recording process, I’ve included some of my insights on each of the tracks below:

Santa Claus Is Comin To Town (Yes, we misspelled “Claus” on the album)
What a fun song.  My favorite thing about this track is the fact that we included a face-melting melodica solo. I don’t think the solo is particularly impressive or anything, but just the concept of a melodica solo cracks me up. Also, I faced a mixing dilemma with the electric guitar for this song.  Originally, we intended for this song (and the others, for that matter) to be entirely acoustic. Then we added the electric, and it sounded good, but I liked the acoustic feel for this song better, so I kept the electric guitar medium-low in the mix. Oh, and I kept the laughing blooper at the end because like most people, I find Joe’s laugh irresistible.

All The Right Reasons
When I wrote this song, Joe and I thought it would have a really energetic, peppy, cartoonish feel to it, but it ended up being way more chill. In fact, the mood is so chill that I’m kind of afraid you guys will miss the sarcastic elements of the song. Just to set the record straight, it’s totally tongue-in-cheek. I wanted to make a song about loving Christmas for all the wrong reasons, and I did, but being as sarcastic as I am, I produced it like a sincere song.  But seriously, Christmas is about Jesus. Not presents. Not shopping. Not even giving or family. I was watching “Deal or No Deal: Christmas Special” today, and Howie Mendel (Jewish) was giving presents out to the audience members, Oprah-style. Several different times, he said  things like “Christmas is about giving, so now I’m giving everyone in the audience a hundred bucks!” or whatever. WRONG, HOWIE. Even though no one seems to have a problem with that statement, and giving is good and Christ-like, Christmas is NOT about giving. It’s about Jesus. The end.
My favorite thing about this track is the sweet overdriven Rhodes keyboard sound I found in Reason. It comes in on the second chorus, panned to the right to complement the electric guitar on the left. Listen for it!

O Come O Come Emmanuel
As I mentioned earlier, we recorded these vocals dead last, at like midnight or 1 AM. Bleh… not a good time for my voice. Given some extra time, I would have re-recorded all those vocals in the morning.
Speaking of vocals, there are three tracks total. I added a bass harmony under the third (original) verse.
The recording geeks among you might notice that the acoustic guitar has a nice stereo spread, and that’s because we used an X-Y mic pattern (using the Samson C02’s) to record my Ovation in stereo for every song on the EP.
And the keyboard synth interlude? Yeah, another sweet rhodes sound from Reason, this time with delay. I programmed that MIDI part on the road. It worked out, haha.

Snow Miser vs Heat Miser
Okay, first of all, every time I told people we were doing this song, I got blank stares.  I was flabbergasted by the number of people who had never heard of it. Flabbergasted. In case you’re one of those people, Snow Miser and Heat Miser are  characters in the claymation movie A Year Without Santa Claus. It’s a classic. If you haven’t seen it, you need to see the original performance of this sequence of songs. Here’s the YouTube video I used to transcribe the chords for our arrangement:

Secondly, this song was a near disaster to record, but it wasn’t our fault. Somehow, my project file in Logic Express got messed up, and it kept randomly shifting our audio takes. I spent HOURS manually realigning tracks for almost every instrument with the tempo. It was a tedious process that sent me in circles, solving timing issues that created others.  It was a mess. So, if you detect some weird timing things in this song, please be kind. Technology was against us on this one.
Other things: We needed an electric bass for this song, but didn’t have one, so we tried to make my acoustic-electric bass sound truly electric with amp modeling and distortion.  It was weird, but it worked. Sort of.
Recording the vocals for this song was way too much fun. It was like musical theater. Joe was “way out of [his] comfort zone.”
My favorite thing about this song is probably the “imp” background vocals. Those parts consist of three tracks of two singers each, panned around to sound like a small men’s choir. I’m really happy with the way those turned out. Oh, and I couldn’t take the song seriously until we tracked drums. They hold the whole thing together.

Auld Lang Syne
This was all Joe. We recorded it in complete takes, with Joe playing guitar while he sang… no editing. (I LOVED the “no editing” part.) I tried to isolate the guitar and vocal mics as much as possible, and the result was a noisy track due to the volume adjustments I made to compensate for the low gain. I was able to filter a lot of the hiss out, but if we recorded this song again, I’d definitely do it a different way.
The end of the song was literally recorded on a laptop, which was another one of Joe’s really cool ideas. Raw, natural, cool.

Okay, I’ll shut up now.  Thanks for listening, everybody! Let me know what you think about the album. Also, feel free to ask questions if you’re still curious about something.

And don’t forget the PHOTOS!