FOCUS!
One of my favourite moments from the sessions was when Warren was recording his bits for one of the songs and he totally missed his mark on one bit. Why? He started reading the Exclaim! newspaper on the control board.
My other favourite part was Mario being dressed down by Andrea, Brodie’s assistant. Yesterday we spent way too long agonizingly trying to direct Mario to alter his guitar solo in “Nyarlathotep” so it didn’t sound the same as the solo in a couple other songs. Finally after too many do-overs to count we got something we were all happy with – or at least Brodie, Andrea and I were. This morning Mario was in the recording room and said “I still need to go back and finish the solo for Nyarlathotep” to which Andrea hit the talkbalk button and stated boldly:
“NO YOU DON’T. IT’S DONE.”
Today, after finishing up Mario’s many flourishes, we laid down some keyboards, all of which I’m sure will be replaced, scrapped or all of the above. Then we did some rough mixdowns with no vocals. Over the next few weeks I’ll make sure I’ve got all the vocals 100% ready to go so that when Brodie comes back from his holidays circa the 15th we can snap to it. We’ll do that over the course of a few weekends, including a trip to Chilliwack for Merrick’s sake and to get Jordan in on some extra percussion, and then we’ll be mixing in early February.
Mario brings his family.
I screw around with keyboards
Brodie does it better
A staple of rock. Speaking of staples, each day’s dinner in the studio was a delicious float in a parade of ethnic cuisine. Today I treated everyone to Uncle Fatih’s pizza. Yesterday I treated everyone to Indonesian. The day before that I treated everyone to Sushi. Day before: Indian (butter chicken!!). We almost went in for Himalayan tonight but we started too late.
And now, we are done at Profile Studios. Say goodbye, Profile Studios. Goodbye.