January 23, 2007: Back In The Studio

To parody Rod Stewart's hit, 'the first cut is the hardest'. Windrush was back in Alan's studio this week to try to put the pieces together for our first recording, "Rhythm Of The Radio (Favorite Position)". A week earlier, Alan had given us an excellent near-final mix of this song, but after listening to it closely, we decided that we wanted to take a shot at replacing the drum track with a new one using a different sound from Bob's V-drums. Plus, we wanted to add some cowbell in a couple of places, as well as a new guitar accent by Mike.

Adding the cowbell and Mike's new guitar parts were a snap. However, replacing the existing drum track while keeping every other track in the song intact proved to be tricky. Bob played 3 live drum track 'keepers' from which Alan will try to stitch together a new single drum track that fits the existing tempo of all the other tracks. If this proves do-able, our first recorded song is done and we can move on to the next one, "Bad, Bad Man". If not, we'll go back to step one and record the song all over again. Either way, we are inching closer to the milestone of completing the first song. It's been a great learning experience that no doubt will help us move faster on subsequent songs.

For future songs, the plan is to record the basic tracks on the new 8-channel Korg hard-disk recorder in the basement practice studio, then take the basic tracks to Alan's studio for tweaking and final polishing.

In the meantime, at the last practice session we recorded a quick demo version of "Watch It What You Say", which is a song that John's 60's garage band, the Trojans, recorded in Iowa way back when. The new version rocks, featuring lots of delay, trippy guitars and wah, while staying true to the flavor of the original - definitely a 60's throwback sound on this one that we are excited about. Doug will probably do the vocals on this one. If you want to hear the original 60's Trojan version, check out the Dutch internet radio website, Beyond The Beat Generation, which has the song on it's playlist. The story of the Trojans can be found at the 60sgaragebands website.