crows to burnaby

It's been ages since I've written anything about recording ARCTIC. This is mostly because it's been very stop-and-go for the past several months - between NXNE, Marcus's solo tour, and a few live shows and rehearsals, and myriad other timing & scheduling issues, it's been hard to get into a recording routine. When you start and stop over a period of weeks, you forget where you were and what needed to be done, and all the gear gets moved around and has to be rewired, and it takes so much time just to get back to where you left off. Now that the band won't be playing out for a few months, the focus has switched back entirely to recording, and there's been some good things happening.

We spent some time rewiring things, adding a new ribbon mic and an incredibly helpful and amusingly named studio control center, shuffling bits of the studio around, and creating something more like a proper sound booth between dividers. That and some creative buffering helped to cut down on some of the ambient sound in the studio. It wasn't that bad before, but it's better now. We're also having a smoother time of switching between mics and speakers as well as dodging latency.

And of course, it's not as if nothing was tracked that whole time - there are a good solid number of songs in various states of doneness. There's also very different multiple variations of a few of the songs. One song was originally in 4/4 but it looks like the version that was spontaneously recorded in 3/4 is going to win out. Another started off slow, then was rerecorded at about 1.5 times the speed, but I think we'll be going back to the slow version.

Everything is far enough along now that I can listen to all the tracks and get a sense for how cohesive the album could be. It's not defined enough to be able to come up with a track order or anything, and there's still a handful of songs that aren't anywhere near done. But it's enough to get a rough feel for how it might flow, and I think we've done the most complex parts already. It's less nebulous, and that's nice.