Losing sleep over drum loops

Literally. As I type this at 4:40 a.m. on Tuesday, I am burning discs of the new hypefactor sessions for F.J. to work on during his two-week California sojurn. This is the beauty of the modern home recording system - provided that he has the necessary files, F.J. can mix, modify and arrange any work we do in the studio while he is traveling or out of town. When flying, the majority of us sleep or watch "Miss Congeniality" on the in-flight movie. The ever-efficient F.J., on the other hand, mixes. By the time he and I are both back in the same ZIP code, there will be a whole slew of changes and things will develop from there.

Conveniently, I am off to Chicago tomorrow for a week-long holiday with a couple of the crew from school. I'll have copies of the new material along so that I can write more guitar parts at home, which will then be recorded and fleshed out in New York come the end of July.

After Monday night's session, I began the tedious process of editing the new material and programming some drum loops. The synthetic drums are often the most difficult element to get right in a song's backing track. The reason: They must suit the song's purpose and be completely unique in tone and character. Dance music being, well, everywhere, the bar has been raised for rhythms because the tired ones are embarassingly obvious (hinting at laziness on the producer or programmer's part.) But the great ones - here I'll cite Telefon Tel Aviv, a current hypefactor favorite - stick in your head as much as a shimmering guitar hook.

The time-consuming editing process is a significant departure from The Distracted Lover sessions at Sauna (my old apartment on Water Street at the Fulton Fish Market.) When F.J. and I met after pre-production in June 2001 to share our material, the arrangements of the five songs we chose to record changed very little during the next year. As a result, we only recorded what was needed - there was almost nothing in the way of extraneous takes or arrangement concepts. This time around, however, neither of us brought finished songs to the table at the start of the recording process. The six embryonic songs with which we are working emerged from hours of jamming in the studio, all of which was recorded direct to disk. As a result, a single song may have hundreds of takes and structural ideas associated with it, all of which will be picked through at some point.

I have more to tell about Monday night's session, but I'll post about that after my flight and a belated Bastille Day celebration in Chicago. And for you squeamish types who never tried steak tartare, get over it!