The Hard Part..?

Graphics - check

Songs - check

Happy Folkin' New Year date - check

Leeroy Jenkins!!! - check

Record and do it quick.  We went into the day with five songs prepared.  We'd worked out our harmonies, and made a few changes.  Instrumentation was ready to go.

Diamond Jack was also... ready to go:

The TOUGHEST part of recording live is if you or your band is unprepared for recording.  That can be awkward mostly because it becomes a waste of time for you, your band, and a good sound engineer.

We had a couple of things going our way.

1. We had been playing these songs forever - by that I mean about a year.
2. There wasn't much to lose besides the money for recording.
3. We were all pretty excited to be going in and doing a live recording session.
4. We had a good sound engineer.

I had my fill of individual tracking from my first album and I believe it has a place in recorded music, but the Folk 'n' Thieves were going to be live.  There was (and is currently) no other way for us.  Too long to track individuals, not enough money, and there is a liveliness to recording that's done in the moment.  No time to obsess endlessly over parts.

So we set up microphones with Ryan Worthman of RisingSide!  He kept the session energetic and light.  We spent time joking between botched tracks and good takes.  Ryan laughed at Jake's jokes. Played each track once, twice, three times.  When we we all looked up after a take and nodded, we knew we had what we wanted.  Move to the next take.  (That happened most of the time.)

Starting around 10am and finishing around 1pm completely blew my expectations out of the water.  My fingers were raw, but we left the studio feeling pretty proud and excited.  Kicked back at Anchor Fish 'n' Chips (very near the site of Happy Folkin' New Year) for a beer and some burger.  Talked shop.

The brainstorm session was fruitful, a movie trailer with organ... was born.