Downhere: December 2005

Last day with Greg

Hello all! We are a frenzy of final touches finishing up these six songs. Marc's in the vocal booth right now doing some back grounds and touch ups on a song.

I spent the day in the dentist chair getting a root canal. A root canal is not half as bad as having an aching tooth while recording. All is well that ends well.

Today is the last day of this stint here at Platinum Lab with Greg Collins producing. He did a great jarb. He'll take the hard drives back to his home in L.A. and edit all our tracks, then do rough mixes then take it to a mixing room and mix it...then send it our way to listen too.

Ray (our manager) came in and listened to the songs this evening and really enjoyed what he heard. It's ten o'clock and it will be one likely before we are completely finished. We'll make sure we get a group picture before we do. I'm going to go pack up my guitars.

This will probably be the last post until after Christmas, so Merry Christmas to you and yours from the downhere team. Looking forward to seeing you in the new year.

Jason

Some studio pics

Glenn and producer Greg Collins.

Disco Marc.

Jason playing Marc's Epiphone Wildcat.

Jason playing B3.

Jason playing the Wurlitzer.

Studio dog: Tucker

Producer extrodinaire greg Collins.

Engineer extrodinaire Mark Dobson

Many times, one song.

It's just after 7:30pm as I type this and we have been playing one song since about noon. It's crazy but I'm not sick of it yet. Being in the studio somehow makes it easier to listen to a single song many times over. I'm guessing it's because the song constantly changes and you never really hear the same song twice although it may feel like it. However, when listening to the radio and you hear the same song three times in one day for five days in a row, that starts to drive me nuts!

The song we have been working on is called 1000 miles and I think it may be one of my favorites of all the songs we have recorded. It's a different sounding song for us but still very much Downhere. Jeremy played his lap for this song as well as a small cardboard gift box filled with Montreal Steak Spice. It's pretty crazy what you can get away with when you start tweaking sounds. Put it through this unit then add that effect then reverse it and add some reverb and delay and you get something cool. Or really crappy! This time it turned out really cool. I can't wait to hear the end result of our work whenever we get there.

So anyway, until next time.

GL

Pre-Production

Pre-Production is what we’ve been doing for the last two days with our new producer Greg Collins. All this basically means is that we have a rented rehearsal space with some time to get the songs we are going to record to a place where we are actually ready to record them. Out of the six songs we are recording with Greg we haven’t really had a chance to play any of them live. In fact, we haven’t really played most of them at all until this past Friday! This is actually a good thing. It keeps the songs really fresh and exciting while we are working on them.

We have Sunday off, then we’re in the studio from Monday until the 22nd of December. It will be a long haul but we have some great songs and I can’t wait for you to hear them!

Oh yeah, we just found out yesterday that our producer Greg Collins has been nominated for two Grammies! Both nominations are in the same category: best album of the year for U2 and Gwen Stefani. Greg is from LA and has had some great experiences and worked with many great artists. We are truly blessed to be able to work with him. Here are a few pics from the last couple of days.

Glenn