What better time of year to be inside working on some music?

While we on the north coast haven’t gotten hammered like Maryland and DC, we’ve gotten our usual dose of cold and snow.  Tom Smith has taken the opportunity to use this time to revisit the tracks for his second album tentatively titled “Out On Your Own”.

We must have tracked 16 or 18 acoustic guitar tracks during our day-long session.  We had about eight songs to record the tracks for, and we generally did at least two takes for each.  After each take we punched in to clean up any areas that needed attention, or we comped together a master take from all the takes we did.

I like to fatten Tom’s acoustic guitar sound by having at least two, and sometimes three acoustic tracks in the mix.  Generally I like to have one panned right and one panned left, although sometimes having a track in the center of the stereo field works better.  It depends on the final instrumentation.

After we created a master take for the acoustic part in each song, I used the remaining playlists to put together a second acoustic track that I could use for the purpose described above.

After a brief break for dinner, I returned to the studio.  Since everything was already warmed up, and I was feeling motivated, I tracked a whole bunch of backing vocals for Tom’s stuff.  I did some additional vocal tracking for some of the upcoming drunkdude69 material as well.

All in all it was a fantastically productive day in the studio, something which is (mostly) unhampered by winter weather.