The first day of recording “Elected” got off to a late start, around 3pm, but James and Toby got to the studio on Saturday to load in the guitar amps and set up, and change the heads on the drums. We started off with a getting drum sounds and moving on to figuring out how we wanted the song to go, and then a rehearsal. Getting the drum sounds was pretty easy, Toby did a great job tuning the drums, so pretty much anywhere I positioned a mic it was good. We used SM57s on the snare drum and the 2 rack toms, a BETA 87A on the Hi-Hat, a D112 on the kick drum, an SM58 on the floor tom and 2 Octava condensers for the overheads. That’s eight tracks for drums.
We had spent about 2 hours working through the song deciding that we wanted to keep the spirit of the original, but give it an update. We made the verse have an up punk rock drum beat and the chorus have a big tom-tom, moving beat. The guitar parts were almost identical to the original, except we updated the sounds to be more modern, and where there were horn parts there is now guitars. We took a short break around 7:00-7:30 and then got to recording drums.
The drum tracking went pretty smooth, we got the performance we liked in about three takes. Then we recorded some shaker for the chorus. We wrapped up around 9pm and ate dinner, and left guitar, bass and vocals for Monday.