30 DAYS HAS NOVEMBER....

Well, November 30th is fast approaching. The 30th will be the 25th anniversary of the release of "The Wall" in the UK, and it's been our deadline to finish "All the Bricks," our cover of Pink Floyd's record. After over a year of work, we now have four weeks. There's still a lot to do, and in the spirit of web logging, I thought I'd detail the final month here.

We've been working on the record in 4 parts, corresponding to the 4 sides of the original vinyl release. We're at the point now where we're taking mixes of the songs and sticking them end to end, with segues, to hear how they're flowing into one another.

Spent some time yesterday getting the final chords of "The Thin Ice" to ring out properly, so the big distorted guitars will morph into the delay guitar that starts "Another Brick in the Wall (part 1)". It went well; i think we're got enough to make that segue work.

Mixes of "When the Tigers Broke Free" (with Vera Lynn doing "The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot" as an intro) and "In the Flesh" are essentially done. "In the Flesh" is a live take, Rob Machold on drums, yours truly on bass, and Andy Rock on guitar. Overdubbed organ (some done with an Alesis Nanosynth, some with Native Instruments' B4 virtual Hammond) and vocals, sound effects of the plane crash and baby crying at the end. Basically ready to go.

"The Happiest Days of Our Lives" and "Another Brick in the Wall (part 2)" are built around a BBC news report of a bombing in Afghanistan that accidently killed nine children (out of ten casualties). The teachers are thus recast as well meaning but ineffective coalition forces. This is part of why "The Wall" is still relevant today; the themes aren't stuck in 1979. We still don't need no education, at least not this kind.

Did a new bass part for "One of My Turns," which revealed that one of the original guitars is out of tune. I've been messing around with the mix to try and remedy, but we may be looking at another Andy Rock session to fix.

The rest of side 2 is in good shape. We need to put the guitar solo in "Young Lust," which we're hoping Dave Cavalier of Microdot will do. Currently the song breaks all the way down for the beginning of the phone call section. Annie Rusoff plays the haples operator, as well as the groupie, who in our version comes back to the studio in Brooklyn (not the hotel room in LA) to watch our hero go nuts. The groupie section also contains music from our old neighbors across the hall, who played so loud that I got a nice recording of one of their songs through the AC vents. It bled onto our mics, and now it graces our recording. Apparently one of the band members was in Spacehog, so maybe we'll get sued.

More to come....