Yesterday was vocal day at Orion Studios! I ate oatmeal and blueberries in the morning to give me energy for a long day (I try to never eat during vocal takes as I think a full stomach changes the sound of the voice. I also avoid all dairy products the day of doing any vocal sessions as well as it adds congestion to the voice, or at least it does to mine). I arrived at Orion around 11:30 am and met up again with engineer Joe Tracey (plus studio cat Xaos came out to say hi as well).
The goal for today was to get the main vocals down on the next three The Red Masque songs - "Pearl Grey", "Fever Dreams", and "Fool Again", and if we had time and were able, to do some backing tracks as well. I started with "Pearl Grey" as that song requires very smooth, soft, very controlled vocals on the verse, and I wanted to do that one first while my voice was fresh. Once mains were done, I did backing / harmoney vocals. I had worked out some ideas before hand for most of the songs, but some stuff you can only figure out once you hear how things are sounding on the recording. "Pearl Grey" was originally written to be a shorter, more concise song for the album as all of our other tracks are between 7.30-12 minutes long (most averaging around 9 minutes!). So far it looks like "Pearl Grey" is around 5 minutes. Brandon and I originally came up with that while jamming around together in the apartment. He started plucking some chords on his bass and the vocal line came to me. Then we worked out a heavier section and presented to Scott and Jim. Scott came up with a really great, textural, guitar line for the verses that I love, while Jim did really nice accents on drums.
Next was "Fool Again" - that was a really fun song to do and starts off with a different vibe than our previous songs. For this song I originally had some lyrics and a melody that I worked out but I didn't have any instrumentation with it. I thought it originally might be a song that my other band, Green Cathedral, could do, but in the end, I showed the song to The Red Masque, and Scott ended up working out a guitar part to go with it. After that everyone came up with additional parts to it that really pulled the song together. Joe told me that his assistant, Dominic, who helped us during the drum sessions, said it was his favorite track that he heard from us. Apparently, he thinks it's "catchy" (the horror! lol)
Finally was "Fever Dreams", which I find the most difficult to perform due to the insane timing (thanks, Brandon!) during the initial verses. I am REALLY happy though with some cool harmonize I was able to do with the main vocals during some parts of the song. "Fever Dreams" is probably the oldest of these last three songs as we had originally come up with parts of it in the past couple of years, and the whole band has been working on it heavily this past year.
Anyway, all in all, Joe and I spent 4.5 hours tracking, and wrapped up around 5ish. Almost all vocals are now complete. I may go back and tweak a couple of things or add another harmony, but I'm basically done. Scott and Brandon will need to go back to record some additonal bass and guitar lines as well as all the keyboards. So stay tuned for that! (I am going to try and get one of the guys to write up a studio diary for this, so it's not just me blabbing all the time).
Lynnette
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