Faith Udeh - rock hop?

Faith Udeh has been in the studio this week. She is a hip-hop artist that has several songs that have a pretty aggressive rock edge to them. We are taking this project one song at a time until we get an entire album done.

For this session we brought in Steve Goold to play drums (he was pretty excited about his newly updated toms for his Risen acrylic kit) and Justin Sharbono to play electric guitar. I sat in on bass and quickly remembered that I get a little overwhelmed when I play multiple roles (player, engineer AND producer). It can be difficult to watch all the meters, keep your ear attuned to what everyone is playing and simultaneously remember all your own parts as a player. We got the sounds pretty quickly, which tends to happen when you have players and gear of this caliber. Luckily for me my new friend Dan Deurloo dropped by to see the studio, so he sat in the captains chair and manned the button-pushing while I wore my bass player hat for a little while.

Last week I was explaining to Faith the phenomenon that hiring professional musicians to record on a project winds up being cheaper in the long run. Simply due to the fact that they bring a ton of skill, great musical minds, incredible knowledge of their instrument and a wide range of gear with them to the session. For instance, if Steve comes in to do a full record with me, he will bring up to 9 different snare drums and several cymbal combinations. For this one song with Faith, Justin brought in 2 distinctively different colored amplifiers made by ÷13 (both visually and soncially!). One that is a dead ringer for a Vox AC30 and the other sounds like a beefy Marshall. We ended up running them simultaneously for a pretty monstrous guitar tone. He also had 3 electric guitars with varying tones. All that combined with much experience in the studio means better ideas in less time and better takes, ultimately resulting in less hours of editing.

Faith will come in and nail down her performances, I will finish adding any sweetener parts and we will be ready to mix! In the mean time I have been working on mixes for two albums that I am thrilled with, Brett Mikkelson and Ben Rosenbush. I will update the blog when they are finished.