Studio Diary Part 1

For the past three days, The Red Masque have been working on our new album (still to be titled) at Orion Studios in Baltimore. Our initial plan is to record three songs to start with - "Howl", "Insomniac" and "Tear the Sky Down" - and once those three songs are completed, we will come back at a later date to record additional material. These first three songs will take up about 30 minutes on the album.

Orion Studios was where we recorded our 2012 album, Mythalogue, and we have perfomed at their live music showcase on numerous occasions over the years. In particular, we have known engineer Mike Potter since the band's debut in the early 2000s, so we felt comfortable working with him again, as well as engineer Joe Tracey.

The band arrived in Baltimore in the afternoon this past Friday, and we spent the rest of the day and evening setting up and mic-ing all the instruments and doing soundchecks. The next day was a marathon session in which we did "scratch" tracks on all three songs - this is where all the band plays together for the whole song, with the focus on getting the best takes for drums and creating a template for the rest the band to overdub their respective instruments. We completed drum tracking on Saturday as well as some of the bass and guitar parts. On Sunday we finished the guitars and some of the bass and keys. Brandon and I (Lynnette) will return to the studio next Saturday to finish bass and keys, and hopefully start vocal tracking. We will probably need to go back for an additional day for vocals, and then we will be doing mixing.

We have some photos from this past weekend to share with everyone on our website. Click here to see them.

I also took some video, which I will be editing into a short teaser / behind-the-scenes album documentary in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Until next time.....

Below photo by Joe Tracey.