The Gods of “Something” Continue the Pre-Production

The act of practicing things that you are going to record soon is a pesky part of the recording process known as pre-production.  It’s sorta like a football team doing a walkthrough the day before the game – kinda like practice but without the pain and blown knee tendons.

In our case, pre-production involves going through each song we want to record and making decisions about style, groove, sound, tempo, etc.

Last night, we worked on one of the songs and put together a couple videos with my new handy dandy little iFlip video recorder. It’s sweeter than winter molasses covered in sugar, gumballs and crushed angel wings.

The first video is some random drum stuff with a very stylish Star Wars theme intro. George Lucas directed and by George Lucas, I mean my cat, Dexter.

The second video is about how we have decided to name ourselves The Gods of “Something” with the “something” part being a variable like the X in an algebra equation or the speed of a drill. In short, we are awesome to the square root of X.

The truth is, this “pre-production” is really just time to goof off and pretend to be recording engineers. When we do this, I call Chris “Steve Albini” and he refers to me as “Daniel Lanois” because I’m dark, dirty and mysterious. George is “Bruce Dickinson” and is constantly yelling for more cowbell, which is sweet and sad all at the same time since George doesn’t know that was just a character on SNL and the real Bruce Dickinson is the singer from Iron Maiden.

As far as we know, unlike the SNL character played by Christopher Walken, the real Dickinson doesn’t put his spandex pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. He has them held in place by groupies while he leaps from a table directly into them. And THAT is why we call George “Bruce Dickinson,” not because of the cowbell thing, but don’t tell him because he thinks it’s HILARIOUS.

Pre-Production, Schmee-Production

When I was significantly younger than I am today, I used to wonder what the fuss was all about when it came to pre-production.  I thought, “Hey, we’re a band and we play this music all the time. Why do we need to rehearse specifically for the studio?”

Today, I saw the benefits of pre-production for a band like ours and didn’t question it for one second.

For the uninitiated, pre-production is basically the act of preparing your music for the studio. This usually entails going over the songs, working on how they feel, coming up with references (other songs by other artists) and making simple demos if necessary.

Tonight, we worked on a song called “Georgie,” that we’ve been playing for over a year.  The feel for the song was just never right.  On Monday, we played through it acoustically and decided we needed to change the groove. I played the guys a song by Paul Thorn called “Lucky 7 Ranch” and it was right on the money for what we wanted in terms of the overall feel for the song.

We went through the song this evening and put together a drum sample groove we could use to make a very simple demo.  We can then use that as a reference when rehearsing the song with live drums.

Our goal is to have a groove or “feel” reference for every song we intend to record as well as a sonic reference.  In essence, one reference that gives us an idea of how to play the song and one reference for how we want it to sound.

Now, the sonic references will be much more limited. Feel references could be anything. It doesn’t have to sound right or even be recent. Every song could have a different artist for a reference.  On the other hand, the sonic references need to be limited to just a few artists and recently released albums so that our record has both consistency and a modern sonic palette.

This is the most organized I’ve ever felt before starting the actual recording process and I can really see the value of pre-production of this kind.  I have no doubt it will make a big difference when we start actually cutting tracks.