Annie Fitzgerald

I spent all day yesterday, today, and then tomorrow working on a full-length record for singer/songwriter Annie Fitzgerald from NYC. Matt Patrick is producing the album, and he’s got all kinds of texture ideas/concepts for these songs.  I’m having a ton of fun.

For example, we just finished tracking a tune where Matt ran the snare mic through a delay pedal and a distorted guitar amp.  We set the delay effect to a single 16th note displacement, so the snare has this great slap echo, but with a slightly different tone color because of the amp.

I’ve never recorded with a real-time delay before, and it had a huge effect on how I chose my notes and feel.  We needed a few takes to dial the delay tempo in to the best feeling speed, but once we found it I was amazed at how inspiring it became.

Winterland

I spent the day at Winterland Studios today, tracking some stuff for a hip-hop artist named Faith Udeh.  Matt Patrick was producing and playing bass, and Justin Sharbono was playing guitar.  We did a track for Faith a couple weeks ago at Matt’s studio, The Library.  You can read Matt’s blog post about it if you want to.

Anyway, it was super cool to hang at Winterland today, and I discovered that it’s located just down the street from my church.  It’s been there for decades and I’ve never known it.  Seriously, how many other great studios does the Twin Cities have?

Matt Patrick = Awesome

My good buddy Matt Patrick has been busy producing Elizabeth Hunnicutt’s new record, which should be out in the next few months. He’s neck-deep in the mixing stage of the project, and he posted some interesting stuff about that on his blog. It’s some great insight into the often long but deeply artistic process of producing a record.

Matt also plays bass in a pretty rad local band called Greycoats.  You should check them out.

Two Pillars

My friend Matt Patrick has a very cool studio in South Minneapolis called Two Pillars, and I’m there today doing a session for the new Elizabeth Hunnicutt record. Tyler Burkum on guitar and Aaron Fabrinni on bass are also playing, which is cool because most of the sessions I do are drums only (recording by myself along with scratch tracks). There’s obviously more fertile ground for creativity when musicians are playing live along with each other. I think the stuff we’ve come up with so far is pretty cool.

For those of you paying attention, that snare in the pic is the same WFL snare from the Pachyderm pics a few months ago. Man, these days I am really liking that thing. In other gear geekness, I’ve been using this 20″ K Custom Dry Light ride as a crash. It has a really fat but short sound, and the compressed room mics make it sound very cool.