Greetings From The Studio

We've been hard at work in the recording studio laying down the instrument tracks for the two new songs we've debuted live, "Bulletproof" and "Break The Mold." We recorded the drums for them back in July at NYU's super-nice Studio 510. You can check out our pictures from the session too, if you want.

If you're following along on our Twitter or Facebook status updates, you'll know that we already finished up the bass and guitars for both songs, and the vocals for "Bulletproof" too. You can check out some videos of us recording on our YouTube page.

Bass is typically the easiest thing to record, once you find the sound you want you just need to record the parts once and your done. Guitars take a lot longer because you have to play each part at least twice, one for the left and one for the right speaker, and sometimes as much as six times depending on how many layers you want. In the biz they call playing a part for a second time "doubling".

Sometimes Shane and Garrett play different riffs during the same section of a song, like in the choruses where Shane usually does some type of lead part with a counter-melody to the vocals while Garrett plays chords. If they each played their parts once we would have the two guitars we need to pan to the left and right speakers, but we wanted these songs to be as thick and heavy as possible, so any time there were two separate parts for a given section of the song we doubled each part separately. That means each chorus has 4 layers of guitars!

Add to that any any doubled harmonies to the lead, or doubles on single hits/accents that we want extra heavy and you will see how we wound up recording as many as six guitar parts (rhythm, lead, harmony, all doubled) in some sections of these songs. Then Shane has to lay down his solos. He does some sick lines in these songs, so they took a decent amount of time as well. Tally all that together and guitars are probably the most time consuming thing in the recording process for us.

Now that they're out of the way it's on to vocals. Vocals can take a while also. Because they're the first thing people pay attention to when they hear a song, there can't be any weakness whatsoever in the delivery. Some people double vocals too, but we usually just do one pass of lead vocals except for individual words where we want extra emphasis. We feel that we can get a fatter, in-your-face sound with one vocal track and a good blend of effects to create depth. If you double a vocal it will add some dimension, but if that double lacks any energy/passion then it will subtract from the lead rather than enhance it.

Once lead vocals are done we'll see about putting some harmonies in, "Bulletproof" doesn't really seem to have any fitting places to add them, but "Break The Mold" might. We double the background vocals so we can pan them to the left and right speakers just like the guitars, but usually they are only a few words long so they don't take much time.

Keep following our Twitter/Facebook for in-the-moment updates, and we'll make sure to give you another detailed update here in the near future.

EDIT: Sorry that the link to the YouTube videos was broken, we fixed it now.