Day four: rhythm & blues

Dear diary,

it's been days since I've last been outside these four walls. Fresh air could do me good, though the heavy snowing doesn't make me all that eager to go out. But I'm running out of food, so I guess a quick visit to the grocery store is inevitable... As for the studio beard, I'm happy to say I've already passed the Sonny Crockett point ("the five o´clock shadow"), and am now slowly but surely moving towards my final goal, which is the "LA Woman -era Jim Morrison" look, also known as "the Canadian lumberjack".

It hasn't even been a week yet, and already I start to feel the lack of rest. Going to bed early doesn't help: I keep waking up at these fucked-up hours with a riff or a lyric I've been working on running in my head. Juffi says I need to reset every once in a while, but I'm not sure how to do that. Oh well, I'll rest in March! 

Me and Juffi started recording rhtyhm guitars yesterday night, and got the first track down, yay! with "punk rock" as it's working title, we didn't wanna overdo it, so we left it a bit rough on the edges. Not too much though, jut a little. Think of Boston playing a Sex Pistols song and you get the idea!

So today was more of the same: Janne commanding me to do take after take until it was good enough for him. The man runs a tight ship! But that's how we like it. We're trying hard not to choke all the "rock" out of the takes by fixing every little sqeak, which has been the norm with metal recordings for the past decade or so. We got a bunch of songs done with Janne, and me and co-engineer Julf Sondino will continue on our own in just a second...

And for you likeminded gear nerds: here's a couple of pics of the guitars I have here with me. As you can see, we have "the adult stand", with all the tools you need for making a valid classic rock album, but naturally there's also "the metal stand", with all the funny-shaped shred machines for that bangin' metal madness!

The axes I took with me:

-Jackson USA Warrior, Tigger
-Jackson USA Warrior, white/green
-Jackson RR Pro
-Charvel Star
-Ibanez Universe
-Gibson Les Paul '57 Reissue Gold Top
-Fender Stratocaster Eric Johnson model
-Fernandes Tele
-Guild 6-string acoustic
-Guild 12-string acoustic

Masi will bring a couple of his Washburn N4's, and I'm waiting for a friend to install a Fernandes Sustainer system in my Jackson Dinky, for some last-minute feedback funnyness. Yes, that's a lot of guitars, but with material this versatile as we have for this album (not to mention different tunings) we need a bunch of different sounds for different parts and songs.

-Ben