Hey everyone.

I was just thinking that Im working on 2 cds right now.  One with the Rocksteady 7 and one with the Blue Greens.

Its stressing me out a little bit.

So maybe we could all share our knowledge about what we like and dont like about different recording techniques and different final products; cds, vinyl, tapes, and mp3s.

I guess Ill start off with what not to do.

My first studio recordings were with the Donkey Show in 1988-89.  We had no one in the band with serious recording experience so we were starting from scratch knowledge wise.

Basically, we put ourselves in the hands of studio engineers who tended to listen to Hair Metal, Classic 70's Rock, and Funk.  They were more experienced, so we often deferred to them when it came time to press record.

We were using 16 track tape in 1988 and then we went to 24 track tape in 1989.  Mixes were done by a committee of 3 members out of a 9 piece band.

The prevailing recording style of the time that we were told to do was this; 1)get as many people in the band together in the room but make sure all the sounds are separated.  then make the basic recordings.  2)throw out everything except for the drums and possibly the bass.  everything else could be overdubbed later with "more precision" we were told. 

As you can imagine this style was slow and we only were able to lay down 6 songs in numerous recording sessions over a 3 year period. 

It also led to stupid mistakes.  For example, our guitar player recorded over his plain rhythm track to do a "cool" distorted track.  Unfortunately, there was a drop where he had to play by himself and without having the rest of the band there he couldnt get the timing right.  Guess what?, the drums were doing an idiosyncratic fill, that was cool and natural, but by not "being there" he couldnt duplicate it.

This was back in the day where you were trying to conserve tracks so that you could only have 1 rhythm guitar track.

We had nice live guitar skanks and organ skanks that we redid for no particular reason. 

We did ridiculous amounts of horn tracks that did serve a purpose.  We could have done fewer if we knew how to arrange the horns better.

I think the most lively track we did was Mr. Brown, which I think included as much live playing as possible.  At least the rhythm section was live.

In retrospect too, the studio engineers were brusque and arrogant.  They were annoyed to be working with 18 year old kids with weird clothes and weird hair cuts.  They didnt teach us basic stuff about eqs so as to maintain their superiority over us.

They also were in favor of cheesy digital effects instead of all the vintage compressors and other tape effects they had sitting around.  They wanted to get as much digital stuff as they could into the mixes.  The warm analog sounds were old fashioned.

We also didnt know much about spreading out harmonies, layering rhythm tracks, etc etc.  In short, we were super green.

But we thought we were rock stars.  Hell, didnt 500 people come see "our" last show at the Country Club in Reseda? 

So anyways, we had much to learn and no one to teach us.  Next up.  Some more recording stories.