ben wakeman : : Journal

Recording the New Screen Door Album

January 10, 2006

Tom and I have got to be the biggest geeks to ever consider themselves musicians, or at least contenders to the title. Last night we spent an hour on the phone setting up software to synchronize all of our ProTools projects automatically across the Internet so we don't have to burn CDs and cart them back and forth when we are doing overdubs. We do have to reign ourselves in, because we are both easily seduced by the technology and could witter away valuable creative time tinkering with some knob-turning exercise.

The good news is that we are finally off our asses and moving on the new Screen Door record (I still like to call them records even if there is nothing remotely like a vinyl disc anymore). We have chosen most of the songs that will make the cut and have over half of them tracked. We've spent a lot of time talking about how we want this album to sound and I think we are slowly reaching some consensus. Again, I think we are plagued by our love for all the technical possibilities in recording these days and find ourselves getting further away from the more raw, immediate recordings that we love so much. When you can overdub infinitely, and fix any part with a few mouse clicks, it gets really hard to just make a performance and let it stand.

The line up so far, in no particular order, looks like:

No Future in the Past
Don't Look Down
Shut Me Down
Break in the Clouds
No Time Like Now
Waiting for the Light to Change
I Could Always Make Her Laugh

We're hoping this time around to make a tighter, more unified sounding record with less extreme genre jumping and fewer bells and whistles --- not that there were literally any bells and whistles in the last one, but certainly there was a pile of other loops, samples and big fuzzy guitars. Our mission this time around is to really try to capture the best performances and do as little as possible to screw them up after the fact. I'm sure in about a month there will have to be an intervention --- "Ben, Tom, step away from the mouse."