Document

This is for history. It may bore you, but there is a present at the end (but if you just read a bulletin from us, you already got it).

We spent April 13th at Chicago Sound Lab with Chris Bober. He's a brilliant guitarist, technical mastery and incredibly interesting compositional ideas. Tasteful too.

Chris and I were friends in high school, my dad drove us to see Morrissey in Detroit when I was 16. My brother lived with him a bit during college, and they played together in bands.

We ended up doing all the electric guitars for the EP in four hours. Chris went to school for jazz studies, studying guitar performance. With the exception of a second, more rhythmesque part under the solo on Love Poem everything was created on the spot, with every take quite different from those before it. I don't think we really took more than 4 or 5 passes on any part, and with the exception of one tiny punch-in, everything was recorded in one go, in large part because the parts were improvised and while they could be recreated, there wasn't really a point in figuring out what had been done.

All the parts save one were done with my G&L Legacy, which is a stratocaster in all respects but name, G&L was Leo Fender's last company - the L is for Leo. We ran it into only two amps, a Valvetrain 205TB for the cleans, and a Carr Hammerhead for the more gritty parts, and used only a single effect, a Lovepedal Morph (a fuzz pedal with both germanium and silicon transistors which can be blended), and that only with the Carr.

I had a few second thoughts about the Carr prior to the session. It's a pretty high gain amp, but voiced in what can seem like a sort of classic rock way, but in my listening leading up to the session I found a lot of its tones in late-era Beatles stuff, if it had been around, it could have been used on much of Let it Be.

CSL is a cool place. It's a pre-WWII building, the tracking room has an exposed brick wall, and they have a vintage SSL board that must have at least 48 channels - it's huge. We ended up recording the amps in the live room instead of an isolation booth, hoping to give the sense that the recording was being done in a slightly more natural way than the reality of hundreds of miles from, and six weeks after, all the acoustic guitar and vocal parts were finished. We're really pleased with the results.

Someday this might help someone writing a 33 and 1/3rd, if all goes well.

Here's your present:

I don't know much about John Peel. He had a radio show that bands played live on, and sometimes you could buy the recordings afterwards (I treasured my Cure Peel Session in high school).

Daytrotter.com is sort of a similar thing, only you can download the the music for free. They just posted 6 songs Death Cab did for them. There's a lot of great stuff in the achieves too.