The Light Is On

It was a month or so before Jim and I got together again because on the 7th of September he went out of town for three weeks.  With seven drum tracks in the bag, we were both itching to get to work overdubbing the instruments that would bring these songs to life.  However, while Jim was out of town I had written a song called "On Your Own" and I wanted to track it immediately.  A drummer friend of ours we'll call "Rick" had just moved back to town so we enlisted him to give us a fantastic drum track.  For this track, Jim lowered the tone of one of his floor toms to match that of Ringo's floor tom in "A Day in the Life."  Also, we put tea towels over the drums to give them a really nice deadened vibe.  Also, we instructed Rick to not play crash or ride cymbals to provide maximum acoustic drum tone.

I envisioned a drastic edit on this song and decided the best way to achieve the desired effect would be to abut two different recordings.  The idea was inspired by Dinosaur jr's "They Always Come" with a dash of The Beatles' "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" over the shoulder for good luck and measure.  So on this day, "On Your Own" was recorded as two different drum tracks and will be two separate recordings until the mixing process.  The session proceeded in a similar fashion to the previous two with Rick and I fine-tuning the song's performance aspects while Jim fine-tuned the microphone placement and recording levels.  All said and done, it only took a couple of hours and the whole thing was done. I think the outcome will be really cool and the recording's concept will add a nice flavor to the overall texture of the album.