Tag Archives: recording

News

This just in: The moon will block the sun. Flee!

Dateline: Upstate New York, March, 2024 – We can report with some confidence that the moon will almost certainly launch an attack on the sun in the coming days. Sources tell Big Green that the assault may occur as soon as April 8, 2024, based on signals intelligence. (Note: the signals we receive come through a sophisticated device we call “television”.) Officials say that the moon’s intention is to block the sun’s rays, throwing large swaths of Central New York into near total darkness at midday.

How should you prepare? First, it’s important that you don’t panic. Remain calm at all times, and encourage those around you to do the same. Second, once you have them all lulled into a false sense of security, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! If we all follow these simple steps, rest assured that the moon shadow shall pass and all will be as it was before. On this you have my personal guarantee.

(Important safety tip: Do not look at eclipse through a telescope … or, really, at all!)

Slow-Ass Mothers

Well, so much for the public service announcement. Now for what’s happening with Big Green. Yes, we’re still working on our new album. Doesn’t feel super new to us anymore, because we’ve been toiling away at it for – what? – two years. The important thing is that it’s new to you, our beloved listener(s).

People have asked why it takes us so long to finish an album. Well, I’d like to be able to tell you that it’s because we’re obsessed about quality and workmanship, not timeliness, but that would be ridiculous. (The second part is true: remember that we’re slow-ass mothers.) As always, the truth is far more mundane. We manage maybe one session a week, and that’s usually just for a couple of hours. I typically record and work on pre-production between those occasions, so that might add up to four or five hours a week.

All right, so … do the math. How long should it take to record an album? Ask Google, and you’ll get about fifteen different answers. (Ask Jeeves, and you’ll get lunch on a tray.) If I take the average of the wild guesses that come up in search, I get two weeks of pre-production and rehearsal, three weeks of recording, maybe another week of post. A serious band might spend 8 hours a day or more in the studio. Assuming a five-day week, that’s 120 hours of recording, plus maybe 60 of pre and post.

120 + 60 = 180; 180/4 = 45. That’s 45 weeks at our pace. And we’re still freaking behind. Jesus. Back to the blackboard.

Fall Forward, Spring Back

If I wet my finger and hold it in the air, I can get a vague notion of how hard the wind is blowing and in what direction. Predicting when our album will be finished requires more sophisticated analysis. We’ll need a divining rod for that.

If I were to guess, gun to my head, I’d say we should have something releasable by Fall 2024. (We’re doing preliminary mixes on about 25 songs at this point.) So you may be seeing a new Big Green album drop about the time you’re turning your clocks forward. Or back, depending on which mnemonic device you use to keep track of daylight savings time. (Mine is “fall forward, spring back” because that just sounds right, but don’t let me influence you.)

Illustration credit: b0red at https://pixabay.com/users/b0red-4473488/

News, Recording

In the studio with America’s most obscure band

Dad always told us, be the best in the world at something. Actually, I don’t think it was dad who said that – probably some random stranger passing us on the street. Doesn’t matter. Find something to be best at, he said, and we went and did it. Someone had to be the most obscure band in America, we thought. Why not us?

Well, the nearly forty-year-old unknown quantity known as Big Green is back in its makeshift studio again. Another project, another album … call it what you like. We’ve got a heap of songs to record, once again, and we’re doing it the only way we know how – under the radar.

By The Numbers

So how’s the new project going? It’s going, as the old saying goes. It’s hard to qualify our progress, so I will try to quantify it for you. Here are the numbers we’re working with. And bear in mind, none of us are even amateur mathematicians.

80-plus – That’s the rough number of songs we started out with as potentially being part of this album. The vast, vast majority were written by Matt, and a handful by me (a.k.a. Joe).

40-plus – Another imprecise number, this one representing the number of recordings we’ve started since we began this project last year. This doesn’t include a couple of early demos we did prior to 2022.

24 – Finally, a solid number! This is the number of recordings we’ve concentrated on – songs that include substantially more than a reference guitar track.

20 – This is how many recordings have keyboard parts, mostly piano. Some are midi parts, some d.i. from my Korg SV-1. Coincidentally, this is also the number with main vocal tracks, 8 with backup vocals.

18 – The current number of songs with a bass track. (We’ve been furiously adding them in recent weeks.)

17 – That’s the number of tracks that have fully programmed drum parts. This is typically something that happens in pre-production, but we don’t do that. That would be preposterous.

Name That Album

When does this whole thing come to a conclusion? No man can say. We don’t even have a working title for the album. Call it Splunge or something, just for the time being. If we had a different name, the album title might suggest itself. For instance, if the name of our band was “Choosy Mothers”, the album title would almost have to be “Jif”. The name Big Green doesn’t suggest anything to me at all.

Mistaken Identity

Then there are those times when we get confused with artists that actually have a following. It’s usually the result of a coincidence in song titles. Here’s one right now:

Volcano Man, by Big Green
News

Notes from the underground: The Basement tapes

Well, Big Green may appear to be having a quiet start to the year, but trust me, we’re hard at work on the next project. No, I’m not talking about the Cutty Sark model I’ve been working on in the dark for the last eight years. I mean our next collection of original songs, straight from the hand of your flophouse favorites. Just the thing for a year like this!

What’s the title? Well, I wanted to go with “Working Title”, but I thought I’d save that for the first album by a band I’ve been contemplating called Various Artists. All I can tell you is, it will have new material. And lots of it.

Let me put it this way: I don’t know how tall the building will be when it’s finished, but as of now the foundation covers ten square blocks. It’s gonna be a big one, folks, so stay tuned. And while you’re waiting, check out our latest posts on YouTube: