Inside The Belly Of The Whale: Session 8

Returning Home

Recently, the band reconvened at The Whale to begin tracking the second half of our next record. The plan was to spend the past few months penning out the rest of the tracks while I had other bands producing at The Whale, and we'd return with a fresh batch of songs to round out the sophomore effort. For the most part, this is where we're at.

We finished instrumental tracking on the first six tunes in the fall:

Leviathan

Long Dark Night

Three Over Four

You Won't Rule The World

Some Things You Never Wash Away

The Contented Tune *

The tone of these 6 tunes is polished and precise, with all the production of late Zeppelin and Queen. With those tracks, I really want the sound to be expansive,... even on Three Over Four, which has a very intimate feel. On that track, I occasionally have two or three layers of acoustic guitars to give it a full, rich quality. Each of these tunes was tracked to a click and each was tracked in pieces... starting with scratch tracks, then adding the instruments like legos to form the finished sound. This is the approach we took on Marionette almost entirely.

The Contented Tune was left half done at the end of the fall sessions. Tyler was still wrestling the bass line down, and the keys remained scratch. We chose to start with this song when we returned to The Whale. The Contented Tune has changed slightly in the last few months as we've adapted the piece for live shows. On the recording, I have layers as many as 5 guitar parts at one time. I am a man of many talents, but playing all 5 parts at once is beyond even my extraordinary reach. In addition, Tyler and Scott have honed the groove down to its essence and allowed the song to really breath. All that being said, we elected to keep the work we did in the fall for the recording and add to that, as opposed to starting from scratch on it. Using preamps by ART and an Electro Harmonix fuzz box, Tyler tracked the bass part in 2 takes... one to practice, one for history. I will give you a taste of The Contented Tune when we have finished tracking the keys.

For now, peace to you all.

Mike.