November 13th, 2008

9 years or so ago….

…I went to see a band  called Shagg at a bar in Manhattan’s West Village called the Baggot Inn.  My roommate at the time, Brendan Stanley (aka “Brains”) had a cousin who was married to the leader in this band, Michael Preston.  Brains informed me that I might want to check them out as a potential band to record.  This was 1999 and I was about a year deep into my 6 year stay in NY.  I  owned a basic protools rig (the now discontinued Digi 001) for less than a month at this point and set up a home recording rig in my apartment in Astoria, Queens.  After seeing Shagg we chatted and talked about doing some recording at some point.  Nothing got locked in.  After going to see them a few more times, I guess I was able to earn their respect.  Either that or they realized that me recording an EP for FREE was a pretty sweet deal.  We agreed to start a 5 song recording project using my apartment as the studio.

The band was made up of Aaron Mitchell (vocals), Michael Preston (guitars and vocals), Eddie Rubiez (djembe/percussion) Mark Sakamoto (Monster FRETLESS Bass) and one PJ Loughran (Sax). We did a weekend recording session in February of 2000, using my living room as the live room and my bedroom as the control room.  The end of the elevated N train (Can anyone say Ditmars Blvd.) was about a block from my house so trains were roaring in and out every 5 -10 minutes.  We got pretty good at spacing out takes.  I’m amazed that my elderly Greek landlord that lived above me never said a thing about the thumping Djembe in the apt below him.   Anyhow, we cut basic tracks for 5 songs that day.  Djembe/percussion, Bass and Acoustic Guitar.  We’d overdub vocals, and sax another day.  I’ll always remember this session because, A) it was my first session in NYC that I ran using my own gear and space and B) it’s the only recording session I’ve run to date, where the artist(s) brought homemade cookies.

Fast forward a month, through lots of vocal overdubs, drum and bass edits, countless engineering mistakes on my part and probably over a thousand playbacks of these 5 tunes.  Now it’s time to record the saxophone parts that PJ had planned out.  Up until this point I had actually never met him, only seen him on stage.  So he came in and we got started.  It was my second time recording saxophone.  My first time (seriously) was when we had Michael and Randy Brecker in to Pink Noise (the Jingle/Music Production company I worked at) to do some kind of funk track for a Canon copier ad.  I literally setup a mic and they made it happen…we had a take in 10 minutes.  This time it didn’t come as easy.   Not because of the talent, but because we were working with denser arrangements of instruments and it was hard to figure out where to put the parts PJ had in his head.  But after 3 or 4 hours we had what we needed and were happy with how it fit together.

Here is a track to give you an idea of what we did that day and where we were in our musical journey’s back in early 2000.  Listen to PJ cut loose at the end of this one.  I think he broke his EWI the last time Shagg palyed this one live.

“Shiela” Written and Performed by Shagg

Following the recording of the horns…PJ asked, “Do you have time to record some of my songs?”  My next post will fill you in on what was to come.