On Saturday, April 4, we were back at my studio to finish recording Hands Up. The plan was to record the vocals and some acoustic guitar, but things took a different turn. Even though we had been recording and performing the song the way we recorded it, James wasn’t exactly happy with the overall “feel” of the song; that the guitars were a little to loose. So we ended up revisiting the guitar parts and came up with a much more slamming version of the song. The new part we came up with locks in tighter with the drums and bass, instead of wandering around, and adds a lot more thump and crunch. But, this meant re-recording all the guitar parts we did the week before. No big deal, just an hour or so wasn’t too much time to get something we were much happier with. After that, it was on to the vocals.

We had been recording demo vocals for all the songs, so it was just a matter of James rehearsing his part during the week, finding the perfect mic, and recording the performances. I dug out a bunch of mics and we did a mic shootout to pick the best one for James voice and hit it. After we were done we took a few listens and decided to ditch the acoustic and go with the heavier version of the song. The next week I’ll be cleaning up the tracks and getting the song ready for mixing and mastering.

For the techies: We used the same guitar setup as last time. The vocals were recorded using a Carvin CM-87S condenser mic through a Focusrite TwinTrack Pro with a touch of compression. Everything is recorded into Logic 8 Pro using a Mackie Onyx 1620 and MOTU 896HD.