This was written on February 12th at 3 in the morning……….Well, I just have to tell somebody, (since my wife finally got sick of me rambling at 2 in the AM). I am really looking forward to this year. My band Hip Pocket is booking like crazy, I’m teaching about 30 lessons three days a week, I am recording some awesome stuff with Josh and JT, and Hip Pocket, and with Jonas.
So here’s the deal. I decided at 12 years old that I wanted to be a real good drummer, I was in a band by age 13 with my brother and his friends (they were all 16), I recorded our first project in my parent’s basement onto a borrowed 4-track by age 16, I had a Batchelor’s Degree in Marketing from UNCG, got married, bought a house, and was teaching drum students by age 23, I was my own boss by age 30 teaching and recording, I built my own studio at age 33 (June of 2008) after buying a house I helped build in 1999! I love life and I have been a firm believer in Kharma for quite a while. I am a good husband, my wife is awesome, I have two great dogs, a cool car, a fun (profitable) band I play in, and I helped start Right Hook Records in 2007.
The first band I brought to the table was Jonas Sees In Color. They had been recording with me and were very serious about doing it for real. I recorded a three-song demo in November of 2006 for them in my small 250 square foot basement on my new Pro-tools rig (started with an 003 Rack v. 6.4 software on a custom-built PC). Before recording Jonas I had been working for about 3 years trying to really figure out the recording thing. I was using a cracked (stolen) version of Nuendo and a Wavs bundle that crashed my computer every so often. (Damn Renaissance Compressor!). So I moved up to Pro-tools LE. For someone that started on a four-track in 11 grade, any kind of Pro-tools was a big deal. I invested as I could without going in debt and it was cool for the first couple of years just recording whenever it came up. I was still very busy with my band Stickboy at the time.
It all changed about two weeks before Jonas came in the studio for the first time. I managed to herniate a disc in my neck (C6) from over-use, (drumming in several bands, playing a lot of golf, and having a previous back issue). I suddenly couldn’t feel my right thumb and index finger. I mean, I could feel them, but you know that tingling you get when your arm falls asleep, that’s what my fingers felt like for about a month. I had to cancel the remaining Stickboy shows and drop a few of my more advanced students for a while.
That got me thinking, if I can’t teach drums or play drums, I don’t have a job! Suddenly sitting at a desk recording bands for a living seemed pretty Rad! I was determined to find work for the studio, no matter what, only one problem, it was a Friday morning and I had a kick-ass band called The Keep coming in to start recording a demo and I couldn’t work a mouse with my right hand. It had been only six days since my injury and I couldn’t press the mouse without a lightning bolt of pain shooting all the way into my neck. I told the band to cut me a little slack as I would be learning to mouse in Pro-tools with my left hand during their session for the weekend! If you’ve never tried to do normal stuff with the opposite hand, I dare you. Brushing your teeth is next to impossible and forget mousing in a complicated program like PT. But the band reminded me of Hey Mercedes and Saves The Day so I was stoked to be working with them and they were very patient.
That session overlapped with the Jonas session the following week, but bands would come and go for about a month or so normally, until we could get all the overdubs and vocals done. (that also gave me plenty of time to learn what in the F….I was doing!) They knew each other and they actually played a show at YDG (your daily grind) skatepark in Graham where I saw both bands and the Lineage for the first time. As soon as I heard Jonas I knew I wanted to record them. John Chester and I knew each other from earlier days when his band opened for Stickboy at the Lighthouse in Elon. I saw him in front of Target one day and we got talking about our musical endeavors. He had recently joined the band and they were looking to record some new demos. I told him I’d love to do it and gave him my number, but I didn’t hear from him again. A month or so later I was working on the Lineage demo and went to take some mixes by Chris, the guitarist’s, house. John happened to be there hanging out with his girlfriend as we listened to the Hardcore stylings of a really good band. John seemed impressed with what he heard and we started scheduling some dates to record shortly after that.
So Jonas recorded two songs, Plans and Sucker, and then Ryan added the first acoustic version of a brand new song called Loose Threads. The band opted out of playing with a click, and there were tempo issues, but overall it was a drastic improvement from their previous recordings with a so-called Producer/Engineer in Greensboro…
The band had great response to the demo, started playing more, making a little money and they decided 3 months later to come back in the studio and really try to step it up this time. John was now playing everything with a click for consistency, and the whole band sounded much tighter than 3 months earlier. Aside from chopping out tons of keys, re-phrasing vocals, and dumping a lot of the back-up vocals, these guys new what they wanted to sound like. Being aspiring musicians and taking music theory classes in college, Jonas would tell me that I certain 7th would work with this other chord because of something or another, I’m a drummer, I do timing for the most part, not pitch, but EVEN I could tell a few of their parts were clashing. I let one of them slide on the original demo, because I basically got tired of telling Mikey that I couldn’t explain what needed to change, but out of the three instruments, something was bad wrong. No avail, but on the second stab at the song, I got a confession from Mikey that he was actually playing the wrong note, I mean it “technically” could work, but it sounded bad. DING!!!!!! This was one of the first times I thought that I could actually be an effective producer, I could hear things that didn’t work, and then I’d just get the players together and tell them to hash it out. 9 times out of 10 it works and the obvious miscommunication is settled!
So, I have to get to sleep, the whole reason I started this draft tonight is to discuss what is going on. I have a studio in my house that is cool, but still needs a lot to be a “pro” studio. Next week I have Aaron Johnson coming in to demo the Jonas CD. For two weeks, a grammy-nominated Producer whose pet band, The Fray, sold over 3 million CD’s of their debut album he produced will be here. If that’s not enough, the new album by the Fray debuted at # freakin 1 this week by selling 179,000 units and knocked the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, out of the top spot!
So this guy, is a big deal right this second, and in 9 days he will be in Snow Camp, NC in my garage studio working with the band I found a couple years ago at a skatepark. WHAT????????
To top that, his price just doubled! Thank god we got him to sign on a few weeks ago! This could be one of the best Music Kharma stories out there……….so don’t let me forget to talk about how the label got started and how we got here!!!!
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