Final Recordings Finished

It has been awhile since I’ve written but things have been moving pretty fast lately. We’ve finally finished the recording part of the Jack Brag album! Last week, I re-recorded a cello part, Rich recorded his guitar parts from his amp and Bill polished off some of his drums parts (ok, I said in an earlier post Bill was finished but he wanted to tweek one thing). This is Rich doing his thing on guitar for the last recording session:

It is interesting to note that we never recorded in the same room together. We played our individual parts and put the whole album together electronically. There was a time a few of us rehearsed together while recording but we never recorded more than one instrument at the same time. It’s been an amazing process & Tony has been at his mixing board spending an incredible amount of time getting everything recorded and perfected. Here’s Tony at Rich’s & my place on his mixing board:


Since we are finished with the recording part, Tony has been finishing up the final mixing and it is going to be sent for mastering before we start to press actual CDs – yay!

So now we are very close to finally getting our sound out in CD form & final electronic form – it is an exciting time for Jack Brag.

Drums

drums
Originally uploaded by bradleyloos

It is official that all the drums for our Jack Brag recording are finished! Bill recorded the last few songs this weekend. He did an amazing job on drums for the recording giving it a real rich ground to all the songs. It's a relief to know that we have hit a 2nd milestone (as the bass guitar was finished awhile ago).

Rich and Tony worked on recording a warmer sound on guitar last night, using Rich's amplifier along with the direct guitar feed that had already been recorded. I laid down a tentative cello track for "Those Days" and tonight Jim will finish up vocals and keyboards with Tony. We had rehearsal last Friday and it really helped us gel our sound to finish the album - remember, "Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!"

I think we'll only have one or two more sessions of guitar and myself cleaning up cello to have the album wrapped up. I'm excited to hear the final product and learn what the public at large thinks of all of Jack Brag's hard work.

Vocal Rehearsal

So, I promised to go back and do some Jack Brag history but there's stuff going on in real time, so I'll discuss what happened today. Even though Jim is doing all the excellent vocals on the recording, I've been convinced to do backup vocals in our live performances. I haven't done any public singing since High School but I'm giving it a shot. I've been singing in rehearsals already but Jim came over to work on vocals with me - it's not always easy but it's been fun. It's just playing and singing at the same time that isn't always as smooth as possible - think rubbing your tummy & patting your head. How many singing cellists do you know anyway? Not many, I suppose.

It has been going real well and we all lucked out that in the song "She Waits" the long held notes in the chorus are one note lower than the highest I can sing... whew. Jim & I seem to have good harmony together so we're pretty happy with the sounds; "Back To That Day" really kicks when we're harmonizing on the final note that goes on & on forever - big breath. I just have to get the coordination of playing/singing down. I'm sure there'll be more on that later...

Jack Brag is on its way

For me, it all started with a message on MySpace. Tony wanted to start a new band - something that had a different sound, something a bit off the beaten track yet familiar, something that felt fresh. Tony had been playing bass guitar with various bands, his last being successful in the tri-state area and he had done some pretty impressive gigs. He thought that a cello added to fairly standard band instrument, but with players with non-traditional backgrounds, would give a different and unique sound.

I met Tony after some e-mail exchanges and we started talking about his thoughts to form a band. I have a classical background with cello and piano so this was really out of the box for me. I'd played backup for an R&B singer a few months before, but have never even really thought about playing rock cello - was there really such a thing? After our discussion, I felt it would be interesting, so he went back and started to pull together some of his songs and write many new ones. He laid down some tracks, playing the structure on guitar, bass (his main instrument) and a drumtrack on his mixer. He played them for me and I really liked what I heard.

Tony had been in contact with Jim, a singer/pianist who's background includes tons of musical theater and band experience. Tony was definitely going for a different vibe and feel than a traditional band. He wanted people that could infuse different ideas than had been done before.

We started to work on our parts, Jim working on the music and lyrics that Tony wrote and I started working on my part to contribute to the songs. All of us wanted a unique sound that would be fun. We began recording our separate parts adding to the texture of the recordings. The album was formally starting and we had the skeleton in place.

Now that things were going we needed to round out the band with live players on guitar and drums. Rich came next. I knew he played guitar but didn't push him to join the band. Tony caught wind of Rich's playing. Nothing can stop Tony when he's got his mind set on something and he convinced Rich to play, much to the delight of us all, as he added a bent of rock ranging from the neo-psychedelic pop to the crazy electronica bands of Europe. Last came Bill on drums, with his background in playing in a punk band. We had been trying for an eclectic mix of people and now we got to see how it all meshed together.

Jack Brag works. I'm not always sure how we pull it together from all of our varied backgrounds but we're created a sound that is all our own. We're still working on the album with a release in just a few months. I decided that I really should document the process of us becoming a band.

So, I'll probably being going backwards a bit to start from the beginning.... or maybe not. We'll just have to see how the blog pans out of our experiences...