Thursday, July 5, 2007

Day 3: feelin' alright

After posting those photos yesterday, we wrote and recorded a new song. It kind of sounds like a darker version of "Hey Ya!", and i am totally okay with that.

In a previous post, we talked about different songwriting methods on this record, and it's been working. The guitar part on this new song was constructed by taking the numbers you'd have to hit to write our band name in a text message (for example, s=7 7 7 7), assigning each number to the steps of the C major scale, and just playing the melody in consecutive eighth notes. It's an added bonus that the melody is the same forwards and backwards.

This is the first time we've ever recorded with a producer. Everybody we've done stuff with have been straight-up engineers, and although everybody puts their own little stamp on things, they've stayed completely out of the writing and arranging process. I was a little nervous about writing songs with a producer, only because we've never done it before. The way it's been going down so far is we've just been writing together in the big tracking room the same way we would in our basement, with Chris sending us occassional messages over the headphones. It's great because when we hit something cool, he lets us know and if something sucks, he does too. Also, we tend to try to over-complicate things and Chris has been really helpful with a good "why not just double the melody" and "try that 8 times instead of 4" here and there.

Current song status:
number of completely finished songs (music and lyrics): 2 [4 points per song]
number of mostly finished songs (music and some lyrics): 4 [3 points per song]
number of embryo songs (music, very few lyrics): 2 [2 points per song]
number of eggs of songs (some music, no lyrics): 1 [1 point per song]
targeted number of songs on record: 10

Ideal song score: 40 points
Current song score: 25 points
amount of days left at Tiny Telephone - 8

Hoping to track one of the mostly finished songs (working title "Ghostsong") today and either turn the embryo into a song or start a new one from scratch.

1 comment:

Christin said...

I'm thinking you guys win the award, hands-down, for Most Tenacious Band Ever.

This blog is a great side-project, and I can't wait to hear the new stuff, both on the album and hopefully live. Big tour push in 2008, right? Right? :D

Love,
Christin in Atlanta