Talking Dog

 Hey y'all Packmembers,

I wanted to share some of our great experiences at Cloud City Studios this fall.

We recorded basic tracks, did overdubs, mixed and mastered the entire 9-song lp in the month of October. the final art is taking a bit longer, but I'll be spending some quality time with photoshop this week!

The console at Cloud City is a Triton TSM, the same board used by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, and The Police.

Our engineer was Justin Phelps, who was a great guy, great engineer, and a great producer who knew the value of capturing without screwing around diddling with mics and knobs.

We were well prepared going into the studio, having really fine-tuned the 9 songs in a batch of intensive rehearsals. that paid off, as we caught just about every song on the first or second track.

Kevin's amp was in the Piano tracking room, just behind him.

Here is the tracking room. there was redwood paneling and floating floors to minimize bleed.

KB and Jim had drums and percussion in the room.

Ben's bass amp was set up in the Space Lounge room, but he was playing in the same room with the boys.

I was set up in a vocal tracking booth in sight of everybody to give cues.

Here's me hollering!!!

The Space Lounge room had cool SF movie prints.

After a day of guitar overdubs from the Professor, I went in for a day of Accordion overdubs, and a day of vocal overdubs. We ended up ditching the electronic accordion in favor of my acoustic Green Beauty.

It came out GREAT!!! I'm really proud of how the little Sophia Mara squeezebox sounded at the end of the day. We did keep about 16 bars of the electronic accordion for the organ in Set It Loose, which made a nice counterpart to the accordion.

We knocked out 9 final vocal tracks in about 6 hours (and 3 shots of Tequila from Slabtown around the corner).

We mixed in a couple marathon sessions, but since we basically played live, there was time to tweak things and add some flava. One example is on Ecosystem - you can hear some cool dub echo and reverbs. We also took out the bass on beat one of each measure in the verse, which opened up the track and let it breathe... great idea Ben.

Finally, we mastered in the mastering studio at Super Digital... Justin again at the helm. We have nothing but positive things to say about the whole process, and have been talking them up and recommending them to any and all. The attached storefront seems to have great gear, and offered to let us try out an AKG vocal mic we were admiring on stage at a gig to see if we like it. Pretty cool.

Well, I should get back to Photoshopping and album artwork, but we'll keep you up to date on what is going on. We are reving up the booking machine and have some cool things in the works that we can't wait to share.

Peace, love, and howls!

Papa