January continues to fly by. The week started out great as I began giving guitar lessons to a new student in the Decorah area who is conveniently located on my way home from work. He has a good basic understanding of the instrument and seems to know a majority of the open chords so I am looking forward to working on more lead guitar and songwriting stuff with him. I have determined that if I am ever going to make 100% of my living off musical endeavors that giving lessons will inevitably be an essential part of that. Though I am sort of testing the waters and starting out slow with only two regular students, the process has been very rewarding so far.
On Wednesday I was fortunate to have the whole day off of work so I got up early and spent the whole day tracking drums to a number of songs on Nick Shattuck's debut album, "Chorus & Verse", which I am producing. While my drumming has certainly improved greatly in the past few years it still takes a fair amount of effort and a number of practice takes to capture a performance I am happy with. However, I am really enjoying playing the drums as of late and the more I play the more comfortable I get which makes playing all the more fun.
After work on Thursday, my good friend and great musician Joe Dawson made the trek to Ghost in My House Studio and we set to work getting basic tracks for two out of four new songs he wants to demo. Already having the drums miked up from Wednesday's drum-tracking session cut out some serious set up time and we were able to get rolling right away. Joe's Savage Rohr 15 combo sounded great and we are both looking forward to fully utilizing it's capabilities during the guitar overdub phase of the process.
Friday turned out to be an amazing day in the studio as Nick was able to schedule four of the five musicians (besides myself) who are adding instrumentation to the album all on the same day. We got started at 8 am when local violinist Margit Severson came in and tracked her violin parts for four of the albums songs in under 2 hours. Next we had Andrew Wild, of local punk band Here's Johnny, in at 10am and he also did a great job, adding bass to a handful of songs. After lunch I had the pleasure of recording T.U.G.G drummer Ben Rohde as he added a killer beat to one of Nick's songs. It is always fun to listen to and record a great drummer as I get to spend a little more time focused on the mics and levels when I am not jumping back and forth between the computer and the kit. Ben also does this great groove on the hi-hat that slays me and really added a great feel to the song he was drumming on. We finished out the day by 5:30 or so with Gigi Galle coming in and adding some great backing vocals to a track from the album.
Saturday night I headed down to the Root Note to play drums for Nick during his headlining set. Andrew Wild was there on the bass as well and we had a great time playing his new album in it's entirety as we were all feeling that we had a much better grip on the material after working on it so intently in the studio during the week.
On Sunday I had another good lesson with a 10 year old guitar student. You can tell he has been practicing and it is always fun to see a young guitarist get more comfortable with the instrument.
All and all it was a great week of music, with the lessons, live performance and diverse recording sessions at Ghost in My House studio I couldn't be more satisfied. Helping people record their music is very satisfying, especially when scheduling works out as well as it did. It is great to be able to record other musicians using a variety of instruments and equipment. This feels especially good after spending a good portion of the last year toiling away alone in the studio working on Animist. Until next week.
