Electrical Audio Adventure NOW WITH SONDZ! KOOL!

[aen]

soooooo, I dont know if I remembered to tell you all, but my band, The Ronald Raygun is recording at Electrical Audio on the 31st of this month.
AND Brain "I recorded that fuckin Bon Iver Album" Joseph is recording the thing!
WOOT! Road trip and recording in a fancy studio!

Yes, we are planning to record to tape, even though I do not believe in tape magic.

[Al_]

Very cool!

[kim]

good luck aen ! you'll kick ass !

it's been a dream to record something there at one point in my life as that would ever happen but happy to hear a shortscaler is getting teh awesome onnnn. can't wait to hear the result.



/and check your goddamn pm's ...yo.

[Doog]

BRILLZ! I'm sure you will, but please get a bunch of video footage.

[laterallateral]

ELECTRICAL AUDIO DEMO

[Sloan]

Please post a TON OF PICS/INFO

there's an interview with Electrical Audio's Steve Albini and Greg Norman in the latest Tape Op

[aen]

Yesss, I will bring the Big Guns to take pics. I'm guessing I should have plenty of time to cruise around while other dudes do overdubs and vocals.
We are borrowing Bon Iver's giant white van to go there and bring a lot of our gear since EA doesn't list any bass cabs on their website. AND BASS IS REALLY IMPORTANT!

[aen]

Ugh, and even though I really wanted to call the album "tape magic" it looks like it's going to be "Surrender Dorothy"
featuring hometown favorites:

Musky Lunge
Never Cats
West
Ghost Bike
Thunder Land

[Freddy V-C]

mega kool

[sp3k]

Cool stuff!

A lot of bands seam to be recording in tape this days, why? does it sound so much better? i mean, it seams a lot more time consuming process to record on tape!

[Doog]

More mojo-arrows, innit.

[Mages]

Cool stuff!

A lot of bands seam to be recording in tape this days, why? does it sound so much better? i mean, it seams a lot more time consuming process to record on tape!

tape machines have characteristic frequency responses that some people like. they often have that kind of low end "punch". http://www.endino.com/graphs/index.html

of course you can just EQ your mix to be similar. but if you have the ability to do tape and want to spend the money on reels of tape, sure why not. it's not that much more time consuming. they rewind really fast, you can set memory locations for quickly locating a spot on the recording. also a lot of people will initially record to tape and then transfer to digital. that will give you the frequency response of the ATR, the ability to use the tape saturation if desired and the flexibility of digital editing.

[mastermorya]

You probably already thought of this, but the kindly staff/community at the EA forum can probably answer whatever questions you have about what's going ahn w/r/t available equipment. Plus I think the PRF crew already digs The Ronald Raygun, fearsomely, or just don't know that yet.

[aen]

Heh, I hope they would like us, but I've been registered there for a while and never really "connected" with anyone. It's like Shortscale hazing x10

But anyway, I don't see any need or much of an advantage to going to tape, but since we have two rolls of tape, people who know how to run the shit, and we want to track the majority of the music together, why not? It's all getting dumped right into pro tools so editing and mixing isnt a FUCKING NIGHTMARE anyway. I imagine we'll be taping over our tapes once or twice, since we have songs that push 20 mins, one of them that runs into a song at about 7 minutes.

[avj]

Nothing intelligent to add except to say this is awesome! Keep us posted with pics/video, etc etc. So rad.

[aen]

ALLRIGHT!

We's in Palatine IL, for the night. Took sort of a cockeyed way down. Anyway, keeping a pretty detailed diary via twitter/instagram. Nice big photos will be uploaded in bits and pieces tomorrow.



BOrrowing a van from Bon Iver.



Matthew (drums, synth) rocking an awful lot of ipad on this drive. A little synth, a little awful country music, and a shit ton of angry birds.



if you want to be "up to the second" (and I know you all do) follow @theronaldraygun on twitter!!
Also will try to get shit up on facebook.
And yes, more pics, good pics, everyhting as recording schedule allows!!!

LOVE
AEN

PS, we are watching MTV jams with the sound off, listening to some really freaky free jazz/doom called Broken Wire. Its fucking intense.

[Freddy V-C]

PS, we are watching MTV jams with the sound off, listening to some really freaky free jazz/doom called Broken Wire. Its fucking intense.

This is all I could find.

[youtube][/youtube]

[aen]

PHOTOBOMB.

► Show Spoiler

First night! Palatine IL with our old Pal Darren. Drowning in a sea of FX pedals and having a bunch of the most delicious beers ever.


This is Jaime. He plays guitar on 4 of our 5 new songs, and slappa de bass on one. Jaime is also an audio engineer. He recorded the Amatuer Love album that Chigliak (or whatever) is putting on vinyl this year.


This is me trying to look like an evil overlord.


Bong 2, Jaime 0.
Both times we stayed with Darren jaime hit his bong and went DIRECTLY to sleep. Ok, thats not quite true. This time he smiled at the arm of the couch and nodded his head to the beat for like 5 minutes, and then went to sleep. It was awesome.



KABOOM! We arrived at Electrical at 10am, and started setting up post-haste. By the time I emerged from the "dead room" Matt had already picked out a whole drum kit and set it up, as well as the Phatty. He grabbed an extra 18" low tom and went with a smaller "normal" floor tom.
He ended up putting some tape on the hihats to mellow them a little.


IIRC we had 13 mics between the kit and the live room. SHOULD BE REALLY FUN TO MIX.
They put one of the room mics through this compresser that made the whole thing sound like Zeppelin. So if all else fails we'll have that one killer mono drum track. LOL





Here you can sorta see my set up. PEdals on the floor, synthy shit on my left. Whatevs, I love synthy shit. Twin reverb, and GK700>giant 15" speaker cab for amps. I use both amps for baritone and aenstandard guitar, and just the bass amp for my bassing.


Brain Joseph our main engineer for the session. We are his first recording since WINNING A FUCKING GRAMMY. We felt pretty special. He also did it for the price of "lunch."




Jaime uses an old silvertone 2x12 amp and a Peavey TNT. He uses the chorus on the TNT. I do my best not to stifle his artistic choices.


Arsenal! Mustang bass (with vintage musicmaster neck! and nice big flatwound strangs)
Squier Tele custom II with Baritone Conversion neck, no tone pot on the neck pickup.
ADH guitars Teligula. Which I fucked up modding and disconnected the neck pickup. FOund that out in the studio. BRILLIANT. Good thing the bridge sounds KILLER.


That M-audio thing runs my Minitaur synth. iPad was there just to run one sequencer track. Mixer was.... brought by mistake.


OK PEDAL ROUTING!

INput>Chameleo Looper
Loop 1: Crybaby "extra fancy" wah>Dwarfcraft INternet>Dwarfcraft Eau Claire Thunder (With features removed)>Dr. Scientist Tremolessence
Loop 2: Dwarfcraft Pitch Grinder prototype>EHX ravish Sitar>DWarfcarft Shiva with no knobs, backwards turning vloume pot in tiny box.
Loop 3: Garage Tone Analog Delay>Dr. Scientist Reverberator
>Ernie Ball Volume>Boss Tuner> Boss RC-20 Loopstation>Dwarfcarft Doublemurder >Twin Reverb
> LIne 6 DL4>Dwarfcraft doublemurder>GK700 or something
DOuble murder is a stupid little box that kills to audio signals at once. Brilliant, I know.


The view of Jaime's area from mine. We're in the Dead room, where things sound wierd, but record just fine. I call it the Hot Box though, cause it was like 1 million degrees in there.


WTF is up there?

A SKUUUULLLLL MUTHAFUKKA!


Recorded to tape, for TAPEMAGIC.



LIstening to TAPEMAGIC



Recording TAPEMAGIC


Dancing about TAPEMAGIC



Resting about TAPEMAGIC

We had an amazing assistant on the session by the name of John. I would REQUEST him if you consider recording at electrical. Incredible. Always positive energy, knows his shit, and he even went on a beer run for us! I dont know why we didnt take a nice picture of him. Dude worked from 10AM to 5AM. Also they have interns there. The one there on Saturday was named Brian, and anytime he saw you he was like "Hey do you need anything? Coffee?" It was fucking crazy. He went and got our burrito supper!

And yeah, i did see Steve Albini. He was running through studio B, grabbing guitars strings, and I was like "Hey this is a really cool studio" and he was like "Thanks, I'm glad you like it." and then he left.

We have to finish tracking here at the Wail House, which is super fine for me. I am very interested in some serious experimentation again. In the studio was very straight ahead "GET AS MUCH SOLID SHIT RECORDED AS YOU CAN!!!!!" BUt I showed them! WHile tape was rolling during my overdubs I improvised during the parts I was not expressly required to double my bass line. HAHAHAHHAHAHA! VICTORY!

[lorez]

looks amazing aen. cant wait to hear the results

[rps-10]

Great pics! sounds like you had a great adventure and road trip.

How long before the "audio" is out?