Wow! The last two weekends have been crazy and probably two of the most productive weekends I’ve had in a long time. I even have an audio file to include to give you a sneak peek at a new project I have with my production company partner Ernesto. More on that in a minute, now to weekend 1.

Rewind two weeks. It was Friday afternoon around 2pm and Ernesto and I have just arrived at the studio to do some work. We had some video to do and some mixing to finish up. Well we never got to the video and this is why.

We started off by going through our sound library. We had a few tunes we needed to get done and hadn’t decided on which ones. We needed three and had to have them done by Monday night (memorial day). So we sifted through almost everything we had written over the last couple of years to find what we really liked and what we are really good at. This took a few hours since we have written a LOT of stuff. Around 8pm we finally settled on 3 tunes. One from a few years back that we had actually forgotten about and two that were written in the past few months.

We decided to start with the older tune since we liked what was done. It just needed to be mixed. The other two songs hadn’t been mixed at all and I decided to re-track the drums on both since we installed a new console at the studio and the tones were now much better. So with that we mixed until 4am Saturday. Nice long night but were both happy with the outcome and were home by 5am.

On Saturday I showed up to the studio at 1pm to warm up and Ernesto arrived at 2pm to engineer while I tracked drums. The first tune came out great but the second one was a little tougher so we spent a bit more time on it. We finished up around 8pm and Ernesto had to go to another session. I took a break to record some other stuff for a few hours then then around midnight I decided to take a listen to what we had recorded earlier in the day. I didn’t like the way song number two turned out so I decided to record it again, until 5am! Finally happy with the tracks I left for home and some much needed sleep.

Sunday 2pm. I arrived at Ernesto’s to record the guitar parts on song number two. I’m very, very tired so I had a giant coffee in hand. He was much quicker than I was the day before. It only took us around 2 hours to get all of the guitars done. Then we headed back to the studio to start mixing again. By the time we started mixing it was 5pm on Sunday and we still had two songs to go. We started with the song number 2 since it had over 80 tracks. And as it is with most mix sessions the next 10 hours went by in a flash. 80 tracks isn’t easy to mix but we got it done and done well! We did a little preliminary mixing on song 3 and decided to call it a night around 5am, again.

Monday we decided to sleep in a bit and didn’t start until 5pm. We only had one tune to finish and we were anticipating a much shorter night than the previous two nights. It was shorter but not by much. We fired up the session for song 3 and I decided that I didn’t like the drum tracks and set off to record them for the second time that weekend. Not the best idea to play loud drums and then mix but we didn’t have much choice. This time the drum tracks came out great! I was happy and mixing was actually a breeze. We finished up around 1:30am Tuesday morning. We each took copies home to have a final listen since I had to send the tracks off that morning.

I had to be up at 5am to take my girlfriend to the airport and then had to be at Musicians Institute to teach at 10am. On the way home from the airport I was listening to the mixes and there were a few things I didn’t like so I headed back to the studio to make a few changes. It’s 6am!!! The last place I wanted to be was at the studio but luckily for me it only took me an hour to make the changes and I was home before 8am and had the tracks e-mailed shortly there after. End of crazy weekend 1.

Here is that audio clip I promised you. I’ll give you some more info on this new project in the near future.

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Crazy weekend 2

I mentioned in one of the “Video Updates” that I am working on some stuff just for drummers and we are finally getting close to launching this new section of the website. This content will be about drum education. Some being articles and some will be available for purchase. I’ll get into more details later but last weekend (the week after crazy weekend 1) I locked my self in at home and wrote some of the new drum material. Like the previous weekend I started on Friday, around noon, and didn’t leave my place until 5pm Sunday! I only slept for a few hours Friday night and a few hours Saturday night.

I keep a midi keyboard at home and have Logic Pro loaded on my laptop just incase I don’t want to go to the studio. It allows me to get ideas out quickly so I don’t forget them. Then I take them to the studio to finish them off.

I have been working on this stuff a lot recently and in the very near future we will be adding everything to the site. I’m excited about it and can’t wait to get it up. If you would like to be notified when everything is up sign up for the mailing list and make sure to check the “drummer’s corner” box.

Anyway that’s all for now. Keep makin’ noize!

Charlie

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