285. "The Wagon" by Dinosaur Jr

Spent most of yesterday trying to put together a studio for the band at our drummer's place of business (in a former meat locker, to be precise). There's nothing high-tech about this deal... we're basically pooling all of the resources we've purchased, scavenged, or otherwise accrued throughout the year at the most logical central location, the place where we rehearse, and gearing up to take on the project of recording ourselves more or less properly. That is, in large part, what I had in mind when taking on this project: forcing myself to learn how to do this stuff. By the end of the day, through a lot of troubleshooting and trial and error which was a good deal more rigorous than we can usually muster, we managed to have ten tracks clearly recording simultaneously. Sounds like a little thing, but it's a big deal to me.

Since a lot of the heart of the control room is the my laptop and my (well, Heckman's) MOTU unit, and my mics and stands are forming part of its gear complement, I'm going to have to get used to sorting out which stuff I can leave there and what needs to go home with me to keep 39-40 afloat when I'm not "at the studio". I managed to get a good slimmed down cross-section of what I need, including that new pop screen about which I'm so excited, but somehow I managed not to bring home a pair of headphones. So this recording was done entirely based on what I was hearing out of the laptops's shitty little speakers. Yeah, I should have "real" speakers to properly mix stuff anyway, but hey, I don't. I tried to create a track that came as close to using that kind of "blind mixing" as a positive. The acoustic and vocal were actually recorded on the same mic in mono. I don't know it it worked or not, really.

Personnel: Rex

"The Wagon" performed by Dinosaur Jr.

"The Wagon" performed by Rex Broome