Chris Brooks: recording the follow up to master plan

News:
22-01-2009:
Chris Brooks says:

Anyways, I started tracking drums for the new album "The Axis of All Things" yesterday. We're looking at doing 4 days of drums but at the rate we're going we might end up using most of the last day for edits / choosing best takes.



John Romeo (Cosima DeVito's MD) is engineering in his home studio and he'll help me mix after I take the drum submixes home to do the rest.

Yesterday we set up sounds but still managed to get 2 songs (the title track, and "Feeding the Myth") down and a first take of another song ("Not the day, nor the hour"). There are 11 songs to do in total. One of them is a tribute to one of my early influences, and another is a COVER of one of my early influences. Any guesses?

I'm looking around for some special guests to help me out. I already have Rick Graham and I've asked Brett Garsed. Anyone have any other (realistic) suggestions? Might not have to be a guitarist, maybe a cool sax player or Ethiopian Nose Flautist

Heading to the studio for day two in a couple of hours and I'm hoping we'll cut through 4 or 5 songs today...

In specific terms, these are songs designed to play and have fun with live. I wrote all the songs on guitar and barely touched a keyboard. There won't be much of those on the CD anyway and there won't be in the live band. I didn't think conceptually too much and just wrote a bunch of songs that are cool to play on the guitar and hopefully cool to listen to as well. More rhythm guitar parts, more clean guitars, semi-driven etc, more groove, a few fusion-inspired ideas, some chord voicings that I came up with whilst writing instead of letting the keys do the cool extensions haha. You could say there's a lot less of the "standard" prog sort of sound but there's still some songs that fans of "Crack in the Hourglass" for instance would dig. And for those who've moved on from that sound, I think there's something for them too...

Oh yeah, and on day two our drummer Peter McDonaugh smashed through 8 songs in 6 hours which is a massive effort I reckon. Most of them won't even need many edits. We just got "vibe" takes first up and then a secondary take for "spare parts" if needed. Only one songs left to do now and then I can spend the rest of the studio time on edits before I upgrade a few things in my home setup to do guitars over several weeks most likely...

The cover tune is "Hammer's Heart" by Kee Marcello. Kee himself said he's anxious to hear what I do with it. No pressure huh?

That leaves the tribute song... No, not Vinnie nor Brett.