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10.31.10 Full Speed Veronica's Summer of Ten by Matt Worley In late June, my band embarked on a mission: to get some of our songs recorded ourselves. We'd talked for a few months about someone else helping us out, but the costs were prohibitive to say the least. $50 an hour was the low end. So we came up with a new low end: We'd do it on our own. Never mind that none of us are sound engineers. Or very proficient at using the computer recording software. We've just been listening and playing music for a long time. That's our experience. And we know what our songs are supposed to sound like. Nathan, our bassist (except when he's playing keyboards or something else) bought an interface that would allow us to record all of the basic tracks at the same time. This was our ticket to start the process. A few aborted attempts occurred earlier when we tried to record one instrument. Then another. Then another. None of us were used to playing like that, and it didn't come out right. Not at all. Nope, we're good when we're all playing together. And so one Sunday afternoon in the early summer, Nathan and I began setting up mics and the computer. The band recorded for four hours that day. And all of the basic instrument tracks for eight songs went down. It turns out that was the easy part. We started to tackle each song individually for vocals, extra tracks and mixing. Some sessions were very productive. Some days we didn't get anything done. It was exhilarating when everything fell into place (holy crap! listen to how good we sound!). Frustrating when nothing seemed to work (#$^*@!). Nathan's computer was kind of finicky. Or maybe we were overloading its processor. It wasn't the same thing every time. One day (after the first Sunday performance of God, which Malcolm and Brandon had attended beforehand) we couldn't get anything done. While most days we were in our practice space, this afternoon was in Malcolm's garage. And I was spilling beer everywhere. The computer would shift new tracks a second or so after recording everything. Everyone was distracted, so everything was off. The day was a wash. Here's the thing about the recording process after basic tracks are down: We don't all have something to do all the time. There's the guy at the computer (and we were all pretty good at hitting record and other basic functions of the software). There's the guy performing into the mic (be it vocals or extra guitars or whatever). And then there's the others silently encouraging the process. This might include jumping up and down, pumping our fists, silently mouthing the words or downing beers in quick succession. We never re-recorded my drum tracks, so all of that is just as it was the first day. I changed the quality of the drum sounds with computer filters, but the performance was all from our original takes. I added backing vocals to a few songs (some of which were either buried or taken out completely, but others worked out great). One song ("Jaywalking In L.A.") has extensive amounts of guitar feedback, all of which had to be redone because the first recording yielded high pitched and completely unusable sounds. Another ("She's Still Here") has multi-layered vocals in the breakdown or bridge section, much of which was created on the spot by Nathan and Malcolm while neither Brandon or I were around. Brandon spent a few hours adding acoustic guitar to a couple of songs. Malcolm changed some of the lyrics to a song we thought we were done with (the new lyrics were much better). And I'm not even going to get into the mixing. The name is somewhat obvious. Most of the work was done this summer, the Summer of Ten. The cover picture was a snapshot Nathan took of the women's bathroom at the Atomic Cantina (now closed) after one of our gigs. The artwork on the bathroom wall was by a local artist named Nikki Zabicki. But the product, an eight song demo that represents rather well what Full Speed Veronica sounds like, was very much a labor of love, frustration and perseverance.
You can download it here: e-mail Matt Worley
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