Hello, Josh here.

I started writing an e-mail to someone who had some questions about the type of equipment we use and decided I should make this a blog entry so others who are interested in this type of stuff can read it as well.

As with our last album we recorded the whole album ourselves. Only this time instead of recording it in our parents living room, we recorded Lameocracy in a studio we literally built from the ground up in our backyard. The biggest improvement of this album verses our last one was the techniques we used. In our last album we all set up in the living room, mic'd everything and played live like we do at a concert. The whole album was recorded that way and it kind of shows. It was actually believe it or not much more difficult for us to record in that fashion due to the fact that sound quality suffered tremendously and Jason (who did the engineering for that album) really worked his ass off to make it sound as good as it does.

On this new album Lameocracy, we took a more traditional approach recording each part separately allowing for much better quality and clarity. For recording the drums I decided we would use Light-snake cables which was a big gamble (nobody has ever done it before) but really paid off. The Light-snake cable is a XLR to USB cable that was never meant for studio use. Its sort of a casual consumer product. But using them allowed us to make each individual drum on the drum-kit an individual track in the mix. Thus each track could be altered after the fact independently. Basically it gave us more control over the drum-set.

Instead of having to mix everything down perfectly before you can even start recording and then make adjustments and do take after take after take listening to the playback, adjusting the volumes on the mixer over and over again many many times until it sounds right. We we able to just set the volumes once and to change it on the computer after the fact if need be. That saved us a ton of time that would have been wasted doing take after take after take.

With our first album when we set up the mixer the drums sounded great but then once everything was recorded we'd notice small things like the kick might not have stood out as much as we would have liked. And we were forced to either let it go or make adjustments on the mixer and then rerecord the entire song again. Needless to say I can't even imagine going back to that way of recording.

For the Guitar cabs we used Cobalt co7 Microphones. We DI'd the bass from Jason's amp into the mixer. I use a Peavey Supreme, Jason uses a Peavey Bass Cab/Head and Justin uses a Marshall. I recorded most of my guitar parts on a Les Paul standard. But recorded the song Overdue on a Jagmaster which gave it a heavier tone. Justin used a few different guitars for his tracks mostly his 2 Ovations and I think Jason may have used a few different basses for his tracks but mostly Fender P-Basses I think. Justin and Jason have forever evolving instruments as they are constantly changing their pickups and such to get different sounds. Jeremy used a Ludwig drum-set. We recorded the album with a single bass pedal (yes even Kill the Scene)

The other thing that is kind of interesting is that we were on a very narrow (almost non-existent) budget for our album, and the Light-snakes worked out so well for the drums that we decided to do the whole album fully digital so instead of using our standard mixer for the guitars and bass and stuff we bought an Alesis Multi-Mix. The multi-mix takes 8 XLR inputs, mixes them into one signal and sends it to the PC via USB or Firewire. So theres no need for a special I/O card or interface, theres no fiddling with the sound-card or using adapters analog cables and such to get it into the computer its all done digitally via USB or Firewire.

It was great for using multiple Mic's on a cab or a Direct In plus a Mic. Or even just doing vocals. The USB mixer worked like a pre-amp almost. It also has built in effects and stuff. We didn't use any of that but its nice to have the option. We used a few different audio recording/mixing applications depending on what we needed done. Mastering was done in Vegas, noise removal was done in Audacity and the first two songs were recorded in Kristal. I can't remember the name of the Mic we used for vocals. I think it was an MLX mic. But it wasn't great, I would like to experiment with a few different ones next time around, maybe a ribbon mic even. Due to our budget we took what we could afford and made the best of it.

Our live stage show is pretty basic. We use the same instruments and cabs we did in the studio. We wanted the album to sound as close to a live show as possible. For vocals we're currently using Peavey Mic's live but plan on buying a set of SM58's here pretty soon. We use a 500 Fender Mixer/PA combo for the vocal unless we're doing a really big show that requires more.

And that's basically it. If anyone has any questions about specifics feel free to leave a comment and I will answer as best I can.