Atomic Brother is on the move. We are doing pre-production in the rehearsal studios with drummer Greg Schiff. We have 8 songs in various states right now. James and I are still writing more songs and have about 10 more that we are working on before we get to pre-production on them. The Atomic Brother website will have videos of the sessions in the rehearsal studio as well as clips of the songs. We recorded some sessions on a Dell laptop with Cubase, a Tascam US244 and a pair of SM58 mics for stereo sound. The US244 is a USB audio interface to the laptop. The tracks were imported into the Power Mac G5 and EQ’d and mastered in Logic.
We had a session in the Atomic Brother studio, and plan on doing more there soon, where we recorded some demos in the G5 with Logic. I set up very simple for this as well, 2 Octava condenser mics overhead for room sound, a AKG D112 for the bass drum, SM58 for the bass and an SM57 for the guitar. The songwriting has been pretty interesting since we moved over to James’ place and are working on acoustic guitar and electric bass. I don’t know if it the volume or the vibe change, but we are working better writing the songs on the acoustic first and then working out the details in the studio on electric guitar with a full band. Well, except for one song, it is definately an acoustic song and is not working out with electric guitar. I’d like to put clips of some of the songwriting demos as well to show the progress of some songs.
Scratcher is in the studio with a producer named JK working on 3 songs. We started on Saturday, Feb 5 with drums and bass, and moved on to guitars on Sunday. We will be attacking the vocals next week. Before we went in the studio we recorded in the rehearsal studio using the same configuration as Atomic Brother (above) but the tracks were EQ’d and mastered in Cubase on the laptop. The producer, JK, has been great, he isn’t changing the band’s sound, something that a lot of bands are afraid of, but he is listening to the band and help us focus on a sound; helping the songs sound like Scratcher songs instead of songs that sound like so-and-so. The studio is amazing, it is a new facility located in NYC on 12th Street. It takes up an entire floor of the building and has several control rooms and booths for recording live instruments. There are Apple Power Mac G4 and G5 computers in every control room running Pro Tools for recording. It’s impossible to get into the little details, but the studios are tricked out with lots of state-of-the-art gear.
I’ll be playing a show with Scratcher this Thursday at the Tribeca Rock Club in NYC. It will be interesting to see how the new versions of these three songs are received by the fans.