Yo Yo Hey Hey,
“Oh it’s good to be one of us…”, we’ve emerged from the studio bowels with another song below our belts. Actually, it’s not 100% finished, I still need to go back and overdub vocals. But other than that it’s a done deal. We’re going to post a few videos of the ordeal, but I wanted to give you an early report.
We tracked Desperate at I.V. Lab studio in Chicago on Tuesday. We did things really differently than our normal approach, we tracked the whole song live as a band old school style to analog tape! It was super fun. The downside with this method is that it takes a long time to setup. We spent about 4 hours moving mics around and connecting cables before we even played a note! I produced the recording but shared engineering responsibilities with studio owner/engineer Manny. I tried lots of new mics including my new favourite tom mic, the Josephson e-22…it’s so nice…and Steve Albini uses it, so it must be legit. The studio also houses my favorite mixing console, the API 1608. Sorry if things are getting a little to geeky for you here.
All the hardcore practicing really paid off. We ended up keeping about 99% of the final take we did. After we got “the take” we did some synth and minor guitar overdubs. I think my favorite part about the recording is that it sounds a lot like my favorite band Bob Hund in that the song is very “live” and has a metric-ton of feel and subtle tempo shifts (the good kind). I think this will be the best LiO recording to date.
Manny also enlightened us with some good studio stories about artists he’s worked with, like Smashing Pumkins, Plain White Tee’s (Yes, he recorded ‘Hey there Delighla’), The Hush Sound, and Fall Out Boy. I’m not sure if I can spill the beans here so I better keep them to myself. 
Sorry for the tease…
I’ll try to get some video up here later today. We have tons of footage so it might take a while to sift through. Stay tuned…
