In the studio

We had a great recording session last night. J was in the studio laying the first bass tracks for Better Than This, Q.R. Station’s current work in progress. This song is really coming together as we envisioned it and it may become our most important piece. I think this song will prove meaningful to a lot of people. SwingDoom will get into the mix in the next couple of weeks and we expect this song to be ready relatively soon.

J is a great bass player. He really feels the songs we are working on and is able to translate that into the perfect bass riffs. You can hear his work on Easy, which is currently on qrstation.com. Be sure to listen with headphones so you can hear his work, as the bass doesn’t come through on some computer speakers. I think J has a very smooth playing style and it adds a lot to what we are doing.

This is a very productive period for Q.R. Station. We are in a unique period where we are able to dedicate some time to the studio. This won’t last must longer – we’ll likely be back to our sporadic recording schedule. So hopefully we can finish the four singles we currently have in the queue and release them this fall.

qr

Tighten it up

As you can imagine, it is important that the timing of musicians of the band be in sync.  This can sometimes be a challenge, but practice (and re-takes) usually get us pretty close.  But I’m finding that vocal timing is just as challenging and equally important to instrumental timing.  I never thought too much about that in the past, but when listening to the earliest takes of the vocals on our new song, Better Than This, I found that my timing was off and it threw off the entire song.  So it is important to really focus when recording the vocals to make sure that the timing is tight with the instruments.  You can’t be lackadaisical at all on this point, or you will get a very bad result.  Fortunately, one can do as many takes as necessary to get things right.  I can’t promise that the timing on all our songs will be perfect, but hopefully we’ll get pretty close.

I think that Q.R. Station is a band that plays our instruments by feel.  We don’t get the metronomes out – rather we just play and rely on our internal clocks to get the timing right.  I think this type of play has its advantages, namely that the songs sound as though the musicians are in a groove.  We don’t want to sound mechanical.  But we are working to tighten up the sound and vocals are a key part of that.  We’ll have new sound samples for you soon.  The recording sessions are going very well and I think the two new songs we are working on will be a nice addition to the two that are on the website.

qr

Even Better

Last week we put down the preliminary tracks for Better Than This, and it is amazing how in the demo track you can really hear the sound that we were going for.  But recording can be a funny business, because after all those hours of work you sometimes don’t get a single track that you can use.  When we played it back, the demo sounded very good but there was something missing.  I’m not even talking about the fact that the bass and drum tracks hadn’t been recorded yet.  It was more fundamental than even that – it was like tasting something that is cooking in the kitchen and realizing that your recipe is good but not quite right, or at least not yet.  That is what it was like when we listened to the tracks we recorded last week.  Then some ideas came to me about how we could add the missing ingredient, and it became clear to me that doing so would require re-recording everything because this new ingredient would change the timing of the entire song.  That is tough news to swallow after all of that work, and yet it must be done.  We’ll lay some new tracks today and hopefully be on our way.  I’m looking forward to releasing this work so we can get some feedback from you.

qr

Better Than This

We’ve spent a lot of hours over the last couple days in the home studio and progress is creeping up on us when we least expected it. Recording can be a difficult process, especially at the beginning. First of all, currently I am serving both as musician, singer, and recording engineer. It can be difficult juggling all of that.

When you record a song, it helps to have an idea of how you might want it to sound so that you can plan how to record it. When we record, we are recording on multiple tracks – a vocal here, a guitar riff there, a lead guitar solo over here, and then we can throw in some bass and drums for good measure. All of these occupy numerous tracks. So the first question is, where do you begin? After all, the bass player is going to need something to play bass to, and the drummer will need things together enough to go at it as well. And the singer has to have a backdrop to sing against. So what should be the very first track? On the song we are recording now, “Better Than This”, this question puzzled me for a bit. I had a good idea of how I wanted the song to sound, and it was a very complex vision, so how to get there? Ultimately, I decided that the best thing to do would be to record a rhythm guitar backdrop that likely would never be on the actual song. But by having that as the first track, we could then slowly add lead guitar sections, vocals, bass, drums, etc., and then remove the initial skeleton once things were in place. So that is exactly what I did. I put down that initial rhythm section with a short riff in front of it to provide some space for what would be an opening riff to the song. Then I took out the Big Muff guitar effect and recorded a riff over the initial guitar backdrop so that it would land in the right place. Then came some vocals, which have been recorded on three tracks so far since this vocal gets a little tricky in spots. Finally, I spent some time working on the guitar solo that this song needed to have. I had jotted down notes on a guitar solo for this song a few months ago. It’s funny how when you get to the studio things change – a guitar solo kind of showed up on its own and the one I had written down several months ago went into the guitar solo graveyard.

Now with all of those sections coming together (about two days work) I now can listen to the demo and actually hear what I envisioned for this song long ago. The sound we are creating here couldn’t have happened without the recent acquisition of some important guitar effects, and I think you might enjoy them when you hear this song. The next steps will be some reworking of the vocals and then to get J into the studio to think about what the bass should sound like on this song. After we get that done, it will be time for some SwingDoom magic.

Hopefully we can put a demo up for you on our web site in about a month or so.

qr