Production Update

The new album Snapshots of the Shattered Soul is coming along! On Sunday, August 15th, I tracked acoustic guitar for two songs with Matt Meyer at 10x12 Productions. We still have to record acoustic guitar for five more songs, and plan to do so mid September. I’ve also been very busy with editing recently. A couple weeks ago, I picked up DigiDesign’s Music Production Toolkit 2 that now allows me to use multi-track Beat Detective and run up to 64 audio tracks in Pro Tools (instead of 48 tracks, which I was limited to before the upgrade). In summary, multi-track Beat Detective is an incredibly useful tool that streamlines editing of drums and other instruments that span over multiple tracks (drums for example have multiple audio channels for kick, snare, high hat, etc.). So far, I’ve used Beat Detective on six of the thirteen songs on the new album.

I hope to have the majority of the editing (for the instruments I’ve recorded so far) finished by the end of September. I also hope to have all of the MIDI instruments exported from Logic by the end of September. Basically, each instrument that was birthed in Logic (synthesizers, organs, electronic drums & effects, etc.) needs to be exported as an individual stereo audio file, and then imported into Pro Tools, as the album will be mixed in Pro Tools.

Yesterday afternoon, I met with composer Robert Nugent to finalize one of the string arrangements. Robert has arranged the strings for two of the songs on the new album, and Rich Barrett has arranged the strings for one of the songs.

October will be spent recording new background vocals and supplementing some of the background vocals I recorded earlier this year for the demos (in other words, I may add some additional layers/parts to the already recorded background vocals.)

During my next trip to Nashville, I will be recording (1) live strings with the David Davidson string group, (2) guitar lead/texture overdubs with studio guitarist Mike Payne, and (3) real piano (which I will be playing). This trip is still not scheduled, but I’m hoping to take this trip sometime in November (depending on how quickly I can save the money). Upon returning from Nashville, I will repeat the clean-up/editing process for all newly recorded instruments (the strings, guitar overdubs, and piano), and will hopefully begin recording the final lead vocals early in the New Year.

I hope to release the new album by the first or second quarter of 2011.