I make frequent stops

Yes.  It's been a while.  No dilly dallying around with it, it's done.

I am currently about 41 minutes into to Ridin' Steam 4.1 and barring some catastrophic incident in Dead Man's Curve the album is done.

I skipped a lot of updates over the last months that were simply "We recorded backing tracks with this person today" because most of that wasn't very interesting.  It involved having someone brave the weather and come over and stand in my bedroom and go "ooooh!" for a few hours.

But it's all done now and I think it sounds fantastic.  Jesse really busted ass to get it done in a timely manner and cranked out some updated artwork in a couple of days.

If you're wondering the three picture inserts are a) One of the pictures we took to do an album cover before there was any music b) the original album cover that we made and c) the new album cover Jesse made to fit the theme for the rest of the album art.  The album will be available at

http://www.cowboysofporridge.bandcamp.com

and info on gigs (yes we do intend to promote this!) and the next album will be available on the facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/CowboysofPorridge

That's it until the next album.  Thanks for joining me in this boxcar adventure.

Hope you enjoy the album and hope to see you at a show!

Same song on a different day

I've got this Lauren Turner tune stuck in my head.  It's a great tune.  But I hear it once every 3 or 4 months when I go to Trip's so I only know the chorus.  It's very irritating.  The song sounds like it should be the theme to the next Bond movie.

I digress.

Went to Trips house the other day and recorded my parts for Mowin' the Shoulder.  Trip ended up veto'ing the "Ooh" that Jesse and I slated for me.. which was not the Ooh that I originally sang.  He said the harmony didn't work so I went back and sang the Ooh that I originally wrote, which we had assigned to a girl.  Confusing yet?  Trip recorded an Ooh and I recorded an Ooh and then he recorded one of the staggered lines and I recorded the other...  Only thing left now is for a girl to do the even further staggered harmony and that songs backing vocals will be done.

Jesse and I have discussed releasing a single on bandcamp under the In Liquid page.  I think we have agreed that we'd rather Mowin' the Shoulder not be the first thing we release, but I suppose that opinion may change depending on how long it takes us to finish the other backing vocals.  It's been almost a year now since the instruments were recorded.

With that in mind, I had a girl record harmonies for WH Bonnie today.  We tried some stuff that I wasn't sure was gonna work and by itself I don't think it will so I'm going to have to man up and sing some high backing vocals to bridge the gap between her and Jesse to make the harmony work.  Another trip to Trips.  That man is going to be so tired of seeing me by the end of this year.

With luck that song can be done within the next two weeks (one week to record the harmonies and one week for Jesse to get a final mix on it) and we'll have something to show the world.  Like most things, don't hold your breath.

Also, we've arrived at a second guitar player for live gigs.  Josh Zerangue formerly of... to many bands to name, but most recently Noyola.  He'll be picking up the slack live playing all the random instruments, most likely.  Going to try working out a practice with him in the near future and if I can swing it, we'll be taking CoP on to the clubs during the week sans Jesse to try out the songs on the unsuspecting public.  Might be mounting up before the albums released.  That'd be nice.

That's about it for now.  Hope your winter crops are planted, summer harvest is about over!

It's a bittersweet symphony

Nothing like being woken up by a small child who runs into the room and says quiet loudly "I came to see if you guys were awake!"

Anyway... This is an iPhone update as I'm in transit to San Antonio to go to the original Schlitterbahn for the first time in... I'm not sure how many years but the last visit was well before I could drive.   I think it was on a church trip with my friends back in middle school.

Once Jesse showed up at the chateau the first order of business was to review what we had come up with yesterday. Scrapped the rough harmonies from yesterday and rerecorded them. Jesse came up with a few specific harmonies for the verses and we arranged who would be singing each part to make sure we could do it logistically with the vocals we were allotted. As Jesse pointed out, vocal tracks are a premium if we aren't going to be layering one person over themselves

The next order of business was ... Supposed to be WH Bonnie or Dead Mans Curve. However my computer doesn't have the final lead vocals for those so we moved onto Mowin the Shoulder. Jesse had no ideas for harmonies on that song other than that he wanted some ooh's on the bridge and some harmonies on the chorus.   I sang a couple between lines that Jesse liked and the chorus came together pretty quick with a low harmony, two high harmonies that double each other and an even higher staggered harmony that we are going to have to get a girl to sing. (taking volunteers).

Then came the oohs. We'll just say guitars are wonderful and oohs are surprisingly difficult.  Three part ooh harmonies with varied melody lines came together faster than would have happened without a guitar.

After arranging the Mowing the Shoulder parts into "people" we loaded up Riding in a Boxcar.  Trip had laid down some beach boys harmonies on that track the other day that at the time we weren't sure would work. After listening to the oohs on mowing it was kind of a no brained to use the idea and just have our additional singers to sing the additional parts instead of having trip do 5 tracks.

Kory was originally aged to do some leads on this song so we culled my leads and Jesse sang the parts I wanted Kory to sing and then we worked on harmonies.  We came up with a couple really cool ideas for the final lines of the verses that are both really musical and slightly dissonant. Think if Alice in chains wrote happy music.

Still have a few more songs to arrange but with all the parts written, the actual recording should be a lot easier next time we get together. Now it's just a matter of learning.

As I mentioned earlier I am blogging this from my phone while in transit and I get super car sick... And now that we've hit traffic my girlfriend is swerving the car like a crazy person so I'm ending this update before I toss my cookies!

Stay tuned and stay wet!




Jesse and I reviewed our ideas about harmonies on Two Friends of Mine this morning.  Changed a few harmonies and then worked on Mowing the Shoulder.

I was in love!

Woke up one morning with this tune in my head, sometimes I wish that I were dead, but sometimes, the hardest part is getting up!

No wait.  That's a 2bit Losers tune. The hardest part is actually singing.  I suck at singing harmonies.  Despite that, today was somewhat productive.  

Jesse came over around 10, brought some Chic-Fila.  I made coffee.  It was nice.  Game plan for this week is to get my harmonies done since Jesse can probably accomplish his at his house without my help whereas I need strong coaching to get them right. 

So this morning we worked on "Intro".  That's the low hanging fruit since I had already written a pretty good harmony for that when we were recording the demos.  The only thing standing in our way, getting me to sing it again with low line noise.  It took longer than I would have wanted but it's done.

Then we wasted some time on Mowin' the Shoulder.  Jesse isn't sure what he wants to do here and even though I hear where harmonies should be, I have no idea what they should be.  It's Jesse's baby though so when he decides what he wants, we'll tackle that.  

We moved to the next low hanging fruit, Two Friends of Mine.  I get to learn the harmonies that Jesse sang on the demo we did 8 years ago when the song was a complete joke... 1 chorus is down and I think a keeper.  The next two Jesse changed the phrasing and therefore the harmony has to change ever so slightly.  We didn't have time to finish that since Jesse had prior engagements with Mr. Easton to do Dark Side of the Lake practice.  My homework, to learn how to sing the last two chorii on Two Friends.

Tomorrow, I go out of town until Thursday but we'll theoretically have about 5 hours to get the final harmonies on Two Friends done (including the falsetto parts) and hopefully I can knock out the chorus vocals for Two Bowls of Porridge.  I actually know those, since we play that live.  Hopefully it will be all creamy goodness.

We shall see.

No pictures for this session.  Rapid fire what not.  Eat more bacon!

Wambola Porridge

It's amazing what you can get done when you spend all day doing it.

Due to strange circumstances at work I was off on a Saturday this week so Jesse and I got in touch with Trip and decided to spend all day at his house finishing up lead vocals for Ridin' Steam.  Trip said anytime after 11am so I stayed up til around 2 last night playing video games, got in bed and watched a movie then went to sleep thinking I'd get to sleep in.  Nope.

My mom always seems to call or come over when I'm the most tired.  Today she brought donuts and milk around 9, after she woke me up by texting me at 8.  So much for sleeping in.  At least I got breakfast.  Jesse came over around 10:30 and we gathered our stuff and headed to Trips.

When we arrived Trip was just waking up, Sarun was heading to the store to grab groceries.  We went to the backyard so Trip could have a cigarette and some Pocari Sweat, which is apparently Japanese Gatorade that "tastes like a flat fresca".

Trip mixing up some Pocari Sweat before we get started

Heading back into the house we loaded up the mixes, which this time I had conveniently labeled correctly this time.  By luck of the draw we worked on Flying J first.  This was supposed to be a Kory Fontenot tune. Kory has been unable to make it to any sessions so Jesse decided to go ahead and record leads on it so that when all the backing vocals are done, if we want to go ahead, we have something.  If Kory still wants to record on it, at this point that's cool, but we're ready to push forward.  Jesse got done in about 5 runs.  There was some contention about which one sounded best.  Trip had saved takes 3-5.

It's sort of Goldilocks syndrome.  I liked 3 because Jesse had the least amount of grit in his voice, Trip liked take 5 because he had a lot of grit in his voice and Jesse likes take 4 because the grit was just right.  It's his voice, I don't care which one he picks, in the grand scheme of things they all sound fine.

Then Sarun returned with sushi

To make quick progress, Jesse wanted to move onto "intro" next.  This song has 2 verses and including crackling fire and wind sound effects is about one minute long.  I think we spent an hour on it.  It wasn't completely frustrating, there were actually very few takes.  I think Jesse took 2 main takes and punched in one phrase on the first verse... about 4 times.  Not because of pitch.  The line is "Listening to the cool autumn breeze, warm bowl of porridge between my knees".

Apparently when you sing warm bowl of porridge it sounds like "Wambola" which lead to trip sampling that phrase, cutting and pasting it, doing loopers, delays and splices and all sorts of comptech lunacy.  It was pretty amusing but mostly just burned 30 minutes.  So after we had fun with that for a while, we tried different lines... "breeze... bowl of porridge between", "breeze... warm bowl of porridge tween", "breeze... warm porridge between".  Jesse couldn't even make it through the line without the bowl.  He got to warm por and burst into laughter saying "it's gotta be in a bowl".  Apparently he got the mental image of a warm oatmeal spread between his thighs in some sort of sexual oat conquest.  Disturbing.  I really liked the contrast between cool breeze and warm porridge.. which I voiced, and then was picked on about writing 'high art'. Ah well.  The porridge is no longer warm.  We have no Wambola.

To end the song Trip wanted Jesse to sniffle like he was sad.  We took more takes on the sniff than the vocals.  "Give me more drama in the sniff".  It's not a phrase I would have ever expected to hear.  And trust me, when you do hear it, and the person saying it is serious, it's really hard to be serious and not laugh afterwards, no matter what the sniff sounds like.

After Jesse finished having the sniffles he wanted a break so we did Riding in a Boxcar.  I originally wanted Kory to do a call and response on this one with me.  Since I still had lead vocals on it either way, I ran through all of them and much like Flying J, if Kory makes the time to come over and record we'll happily put him down, but in the meantime, we can push forward.  Jesse and I have completely different vocal timbres, so after a few quick mic swaps and preamp tweaks I was ready to go.  Most of the song went pretty straight through.  Before we started Trip said "lets work on your annunciations first."  I resang the first line the way I knew he wanted me to and he got excited and yelled "Lets go!"  I guess you work with someone long enough, if you're paying attention you learn what they want.  Things went pretty quick except for the last line which I always knew needed to be there, but I hadn't ever decided what the line needed to be, nor had I written a melody.  That single line took longer than the rest of the song.  Oh well.

After we did that Trip said "I hear beach boys on this".

Trip doing his best beach boys impersonation

Trip laid down 6 or 7 vocal tracks doing "ooh woo ooh" underneath the last line of the song and... it's hilarious.  We aren't sure if it's going to stay yet.  To quote Jesse "I want it so I have the option, if it's to gender, I mean genre-bending we'll remove it."  I like the idea of it, but I'm also not sure about the genre bending, although, it really wouldn't bother me if it weren't for that it's 7 tracks of Trip.  My original, probably lofty and faulty, idea was that no one would ever be harmonizing or doubling themselves, which is why it was important to have so many people in the band that sing.  If we can achieve the same sound with Jesse, Trip and Kory (and maybe a few random other people) doing the oooh woo ooh's, I'm all for it even if it does genre bend a little.  We shall see.

The last song to get worked on was Mowin' the Shoulder.  I stepped out to cook dinner at this point so I didn't hear any of the process, funny incidents or even a final take of it so I have no idea what happened, but it's apparently done.  On the drive home I asked Jesse if he was happy with it and he said "Trip made me change the way I sing the chorus so it goes somewhere I didn't plan on it going.  It'll have to grow on me, but I trust the process."  The process being that when we leave Trip's house, Jesse is never happy with the way he sounds and after a few days it grows on him.  We shall see.

At this point all the lead vocals for the album are done and we can start working on backing vocals.  That'll be pretty straight forward since I'm going to attempt to hold Jesse and I both to 1 backing track per song.  He's off this whole week and in town so if I'm in town things could come together quickly.  On the other hand, my girlfriend wants me to go to San Antonio with her for three days and I am not entirely sure about my crazy work schedule.  We'll see how things go.

Ain't no stoppin' us now

Dobro's and Beards and Such

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"More emphasis on the to-ooh-oo's"

So this is a few weeks after the last promised update. A quick update on that... Monday morning rolled around and Kory sent me a message roughly stating "I'm sick. No way I can do vocals today. Maybe dobro." we decided no big deal, we'd get together Friday.  Friday rolled around and there was no word from Kory.  There went out one chance to record his leads before trip went out of town.

Then a few days later I woke up to this text message.

Score!

Kory remained elusive the next couple weeks. Our next contact came surprisingly enough while I was at work. Kory apologized, his schedule had gotten all crazy but he'd be available to record during the week but his weekends were all booked up. Cool. I got in touch with him yesterday to lay down a date. He's good for Monday and Tuesday... As I work an unexpected double Tuesday we'll have to see what we can cram in on Monday.   But that's the future...

With Trip and Jesse in town for the next few weekends we decided to try and get something done.  Trip did a gig last night so we confirmed him being free today to help us out.  Jesse and I headed to MacFarland's and had lunch then headed across the bridge to lay down tracks.  Amusingly enough we showed up and the window to the front room was open; his son, Xander, was playing a new wii game.  It's the wii version of "Wipeout."  I may sneak out at some point during this and go play that with him.  It looks awesome.

Currently, I'm at trips house watching Jesse "the phlegm master" Rauser lay down his leads for the album.  He just finished Dead Man's Curve and is quibbling over lines where he doesn't like the way he sang it.  Ah, recording with Jesse.  It can always be better.  I guess I'd rather him be happy with his performance but I usually can't tell a difference between his second and thirty second take.  There will be a video and picture of what goes on in the studio when you're not the one actually recording.  Lots of waiting quietly.  That will be up once I get home since I don't know how to add those from my iPhone currently. Not that it matters to you, the reader, since the likelihood of you reading this before ice done that is slim.

Continued update on progress after I get home

I'm sure Jesse will be upset with me that this not only exists but is on the internet

<<<pause>>>

As it turns out, the rest of the session at Trip's was somewhat unproductive on the Cowboys of Porridge front.  Jesse did his leads for Billy the Kid, which Trip found hilarious.  Apparently, Lincoln was a county at war (and also a president) was just the funniest thing he'd heard all day.  We tried laying down Mowin' the Shoulder which would have put Jesse essentially done, but the mix we had at Trips for that song had vocals on it.  Not sure exactly what happened there but since we didn't have a mix for Jesse to sing on and we didn't have Kory to sing on anything, we moved onto finishing up In Liquid mixes.  Jesse and Trip made some adjustments to Mission: Bedsore and we basically ended our day there.

Trip said he could be available Monday morning if we could get Kory over there so... That's the current game plan.  Now that I'm home I've made mixes that are ready to go back over to Trips for the final four that need vocals.  Jesse left me his beta58 mic and I got my MP20 figured out to record without line noise so backing vocals can be done at my house at a leisurely pace.  CoP is looking like it's going to be out before the In Liquid album (which has been essentially done recording for almost 2 years now).

For any green thumbers out there, it's a little past planting time, hope you've sowed your oats.  Mine are already sprouting.