Accordions, Cowbell and Group Vocals

Well, we are getting down to the last couple days of overdubs. This is the time when we try not to forget anything major (I swear we recorded Carter's guitar solo!) and try to remember all of the little things that we thought would be cool 2 months ago. Yesterday was a lot of fun... Jason came in and played a bunch of extra percussion stuff: some snare rolls here, some shaker or tambourine there. But, the coup de grace was the cowbell on Meltdown. Hell Yeah! It will make Will Ferrell and Blue Oyster Cult jealous…<br><br>Tom came in the afternoon and we did some group vocals. Barry was envisioning a large crowd singing, so we rounded up as many people as we could: Me, Barry, Jason, Tom, Shannon (our assistant engineer) and Terra (John Morand's wife). John then recorded us a bunch of times, with us moving to different positions each take, and layered the tracks together to make a large crowd out of a half dozen of us.<br><br>After that, Tom busted out his accordion (freshly tuned up and adjusted by our good friends at Hohner… it's handy having them up in Ashland) to put down a couple of tracks on a song called Pink. It sounded awesome! The only problem was trying to keep Tom from stomping his feet. Bog boots + expensive mics = bad news! Actually, he resisted the urge to stomp and just played his butt off.<br><br>Barry is in the studio finishing up some backing vocals today, while I'm here in my little studio (read: garage) also taking a whack at some back-up vocals. Hopefully we'll wrap up the last few tracks and start mixing next week.<br><br>Take Care,<br>Terry