When we decided to record different pieces of our songs all over the country, we were hoping that the project would be influenced by the flavor and creativity of each of person and location. New York was a great representation of that ideal being played out in real-time!
The first day after arriving in New York, we met the guitarist Jared Scharff of Saturday Night Live at Mophonics to record some guitar tracks for our three songs.
“Hold on. Doesn’t Ben play guitar? Why doesn’t he just do the tracking himself?!”
Good question, glad you asked.
When we created our demos, Ben did do a ton of work writing and performing guitar parts to fill out each song. Some of the results we loved, but we still felt there was something lacking that the tracks really needed, so we decided to ask for help from someone who would have a totally different perspective and a ton of expertise specific to the instrument.
Turns out it was a good choice. Along with engineer Kyle Paas, Jared invested a ton of creativity into our songs, experimenting with sounds, rhythms, and melodies that we never would’ve come up with on our own. After a day of crafting parts for each track, we took away lots of great material and now we have the task of picking which takes to use for the final versions (there’s a wicked guitar solo coming your way, just you wait).
In addition to our time in the studio, we really enjoyed adventuring in New York! The city was so full of energy, and we were blown away by its diversity and endless activity. This being my first visit, we made sure to take in some of the classics, going for a stroll around Central Park, riding the Staten Island Ferry for a view of the city and the Statue of Liberty, and exploring as much as possible from Times Square to the Wall Street area. We even got to some great thrift stores and tried out a killer ramen restaurant, Ippudo (per Jared’s suggestion)!
Jared and Kyle’s help with the guitar tracks gave us the last piece we needed to wrap up the instrumentation for our songs, so we packed up and headed out for the opposite coast for the last leg of the trip. Our time with Aaron Sterling went so well on the front end of this project, we decided to head back to his home studio to enlist his help for vocal production!
But more on that soon.
- L
