My "making a record" diary.

Mark Wein

Mark Wein

Grand Poobah
Staff member
So, since I've decided to do this and I hope it actually happens I figured I would blog about it here both to chronicle the process and to hopefully keep myself on track a bit. Here's where I'm at so far:

I have no recent recorded music. The last "real" album I did was Desert Center with Felt, and that was 10 years ago. Since then we all got busy with families and careers and we never got around to doing a follow up...there are some songs around though that would be nice to get on tape (or disk as the case may be at this point). I took about 5 years off from actively making music up until a little over a year ago when I got back into my cover band and I ran a blues jam with Tom Harkenrider and some of the other guys I play with but that ended in February. The one thing thats been missing for me has been a "creative" gig where I can write music and perform with the guys I have the most fun playing with, which happens to be everyone in Felt anyway. I just haven't been to into rock music lately..more blues, funk soul and jazz than anything else so thats where I'm heading with the emphasis on blues.

I've written a batch of songs already and had a first rehearsal with the guys this past Thursday night and we ran down 4 songs, three vocal and one instrumental. I was pretty happy with the results and the guys seemed to dig it too.

Here are a few threads on the subject already:

http://markweinguitarlessons.com/fo...-the-first-quot-album-rehearsal-quot-was-this

http://markweinguitarlessons.com/forums/showthread.php?39043-Practice-Diary

http://markweinguitarlessons.com/forums/showthread.php?38973-So-I-m-considering-doing-a-new-album-and-I-need-some-input

The plan right now is to get 15-20 songs written and learned by the end of August. We are having a "Premier Music Night" at a local restaurant for the students to play on August 25th and I'd like to play as many of the tunes as possible that night and maybe book a few more gigs just to get the tunes a little more organic feeling before we go to record. We're going to record at El Borrachitos studio at some point after that and I hope to have a finished album by the end of the year.

To cover some of the costs of making this thing I'm probably going to do a Kickstarter fundraiser (see the links above) in September once I feel like I have everything together enough to make a record that'll make me happy. This should be pretty inexpensive to make with the support of my friends playing and engineering it but there will still be some stuff I'll need to pay for....I'll worry more about that once I have the music right though :)
 
Interestingly enough I've been able to write on average a song of some sort a day, and each day is something pretty different. I hope I can keep this rolling for a few weeks and see what I actually have as opposed to what I was "trying" to write... :)
 
Tonight is rehearsal #2. I have 3-4 songs ready to go.

After last weeks rehearsal I took the recordings of the songs that I made with my iPhone and put them in a Google drive folder for the guys check out at their leisure.
 
Three more vocal songs tonight. two of them more traditional blues tunes with a little twist and one of them started as a minor blues and ended up with a completely different groove and form. not sure what to call it now....my fourth tune I think is going to be an album only bit as it doesn't really work for the "live band" vibe that we're running right now but it'll be neat if we arrange it right.
 
So I took all of the songs we've recorded so far and made an "album order" in an iTunes playlist and listened to the whole thing at once to get a feel for what the whole thing sounded like so far and if there was actually a vibe to the whole thing (which I am thinking there is). I'm actually happy that the songs I have so far all go together just fine. There are some "holes" in what I feel the album should have though at the moment. Even though I dig all of the tunes so far I'm hoping that the stuff I write over the next few weeks will bump a couple of things off the list.

I can't wait to play this stuff live though. :)
 
This will be great to follow. Always wanted to do one myself but my ignorance in the process keeps me from it.
 
Modern Saint said:
This will be great to follow. Always wanted to do one myself but my ignorance in the process keeps me from it.
Click to expand...

at the beginning its all about songs. I've never written a "blues" album before but this has been a pretty easy process so far. This isn't really a "traditional" blues album but it's given me a little structure to play with that has really helped. Only one song has been a struggle and thats been because it went from being a minor blues to something non-traditional really fast and now the melodies I had worked out for the lyrics are not sitting right...something to work on this week. But if you don't have the songs first the rest is moot.

I actually have a couple new ones already for the week, which means I'm halfway through my self imposed writing quota. Setting weekly goals has been really good for me as a writer, too. I think I'll be able to get about 20 songs written by the end of next month and hopefully I'll have 10 really good ones to record and a ton to play out live.
 
wrote song #10 this morning...3 new vocal tunes for rehearsal tonight. I'm at the halfway point. :)

I also have another instrumental that isn't really a "band" thing too...
 
So tonight we had a pretty productive rehearsal...I had 3 vocal tunes ready to go for tonight and during a break between students I wrote another instrumental. The playlist I have in iTunes has 12 songs on it now. 8 more to go before I've reached my sort-of goal....

One thing that I'm doing is using "Google Drive" as a place to keep rehearsal mp3s and other stuff so that not only I can access the stuff wherever I'm at but the other guys have the songs to listen to. We won't actually rehearse any of this stuff until we are done with writing and getting ready for the first show at the end of august so this way no one will forget what they played when its time to start getting the stuff ready to play live and then to record. I also have another folder with all of the lyrics stored so that in case I lose my binder I'm still cool.
 
wrote a couple more tunes tonight. Not sure who cool they will be until rehearsal though. One has lots of promise but the other one I think is too generic. Never know until we play them though :)
 
:)

Its not really going to be ready for quite a while. I figure the finished product won't be available until January.
 
So I came to a couple of realizations today. The first is that I'm starting to run out of inspiration for good lyrics. I have three songs written for this week already but lyrically I'm starting to go in well trodden circles. We'll see how it goes or the next couple of weeks.

The other thing is that I recorded a short jam with my squier and iPhone and discovered that is perhaps the most unforgiving environment to play in. I think I'm going to try and make this a daily exercise to force my chops to clean up.


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So I hit the 15 song mark tonight, of which 12-13 of them I like...,all of them will require some editing but the bones are good and we've been having a blast playing them. Next week we will start rehearsing the tunes for the gig on the 25th, and after the gig (and all of the live preparation) I think I'm going to record the "good ones" at premier as actual demos before we discuss booking the recording time. Maybe another gig or two as well before we hit the studio.


I'm pretty excited at this point :)


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Thanks David! Its all coming together much easier than I though it would...I really need to start woodshedding a lot harder now that the writing is done though since its going to have a ton of guitar solos on it....
 
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