SMASH Hits - Monday, August 22

“He who sings prays twice.”
                                     Saint Augustine
 

Recording the Reference Tracks


Mark Campbell and I went to Mark’s home studio in Hull to record guitar, piano and lead vocals for what is called a “Reference Track”. This is a very basic rendition of all 14 songs to be recorded later in the professional studio with engineer and co-producer Jeff Briggette. (Photo 1: The view from Mark's studio - not a bad place to be for the work day)
 
The Reference Tracks are recorded onto a software format called ProTools, which is pretty much the industry standard for recording. Mark and I simply recorded onto his desktop computer using ProTools and, once we completed our recording, we were able to bring those files over to Jeff’s studio in order to record the full CD with Mark, Tim, Steve, and me in the studio together.

The Reference Tracks are recordings that, hopefully, never see the light of day beyond the “Inner Circle” of the musicians involved in the project! They are very “raw” and unpolished as far as any recording we would want the public to hear (ok, embarrassing). One day, they can be used as blackmail against us for Bad Musicianship Violations.

They serve only as a guide, including a metronome (called a “click track”) to keep everyone in the recording at the same tempo on each song throughout the project. The Reference Tracks are unrehearsed and done quickly and hopefully deleted and destroyed as soon as they are not needed anymore. Although, it’s most likely Jeff Briggette has an entire collection of Reference Tracks from dozens of bands (including “Clutch Grabwell” and Tim’s “Evoke Ensemble” recordings) as a blackmail retirement fund… (Photo 2: Ready to track!)

The recording at Mark’s home studio went quickly with all tunes recorded in about 3 hours (and 3 cups of Dunkin Donuts iced black) once Mark eliminated a few small glitches from the software that were holding us up a little. We then brought the audio files to Jeff’s studio in Weymouth and scheduled the Life Teen SMASH Band to start recording the basic tracks for the actual CD.


If you have any questions or comments please feel free to write to me, and I can address them here:
[email protected] or Facebook.com/lennie.peterson.

Thanks for reading!

Photo 3: Mark tracking the guitar
part for "How Great Is Our God"