Harmonix released a patch for their tool Magma today, which means we can finally audition our tracks live in Rock Band itself! The one track I’ve tried so far has been awesomely fun to play, which bodes well for the rest of the album.

Although we are definitely focused on finishing the album itself, getting our songs on to the Rock Band Network could be a huge publicity boost for Kurodust, and may end up being the main way we get exposure to new fans, seeing as we don’t really have the capability to go out playing gigs. So, we’re going to try to get 3 tracks up on the network as soon as we can, and we’ll all be working hard over the next month or so to make that happen. Depending on timing and how well the mixing process goes, the tracks might be up on the network before the rest of the album is done, so it’ll be a bit of a sneak peek!

Tonight we’re all heading over to Rob’s to get some backing and ambient vocals done, and that process should finish up on Saturday, at which point Rob can pull apart his recording studio and build his mixing studio for the final push to release! This is a time consuming step, however, so we definitely still have some time to go.

Starting the track 'Tonight Party Tonight'

In the midst of rocking out

Over the past two weeks, we have increased our productivity by meeting up on both Thursday night and Saturday afternoon.  We have listened to all the takes of Ben’s vocals and picked which ones are awesome enough to make it into the final cut.  But being that all Ben’s takes were awesome, we had to pick the awesomest (is that even a word, well if not, it is now) takes out of approximately 4 per song.  The process was tedious at times, as some of the takes sounded very much the same and we didn’t want to carve up the vocals after every second word.  So we ended up choosing a good mix of emotion, power and pure rock. 

On Saturday we completed the selection process for the last of the 10 vocal based songs, but with the 11th song being something of a ”Jazz Oddyssey” we haven’t recorded any vocal based performances for it (yet).  Once we finished the selection process, Ben jumped back into the recording booth and started warming up for some secondary / backing vocal takes (harmonies, different melodies and the like).  For each song, Ben would record two takes, then I had my chance to jump into the recording booth and lay down some of my wacky ideas.  Once Ben and Rob had stopped laughing their collective arses off, we would either continue to the next song or Ben would get another idea or two from something I did and record another take.  By the end of Saturday, we had attempted to do backing vocals on at least 4 tracks.  Only a couple more sessions, and we can start on the “Jazz Oddyssey”

Til next time, this is Trev signing off.

PS. The 11th song isn’t really a “Jazz Oddyssey”, but what we have in store is pretty cool.

Saturday was our third day of vocal recording, and marks the completion of the main vocal takes! I did a few takes of Five Faced Fist, then some retakes from a couple of tracks I felt needed a bit more energy than my previous takes had given them; I was much happier with my performance this time around.

The next step is to go through each track and find the best combination of takes to put the vocals for each song together. We don’t believe in micro-editing a song too much, as we feel it takes away from the integrity of the song a bit, so we will be trying to keep large chunks of each take intact as much as we can. I’m sure there will be a few bits in each song that we’ll need to do pick up takes of, however!

Trevor and I have started authoring our tracks for the Rock Band Network, which is coming along great; it’s pretty damned cool seeing our songs as they’ll look in the game, even though we can’t test them out on the game itself yet for region control issues (don’t get me started).

I remembered to bring the camera and the memory card this week, so here are some photos of the vocal recording setup:

The view from within the recording 'booth'

Rob and Trevor at the monitoring station

The monitoring station being, of course, Rob's hallway.

Rob's trademark style is all over this set up!

A frustrated Rob re-adjusts his gear after Ben absent mindedly twiddles all the knobs

Rock Band Network authoring begins!

The songs aren’t finished yet, but the tools are out so I’m itching to get going on authoring our songs for Rock Band. If all goes well, we’ll be able to release the tracks alongside or soon after the album!