Loopy Loops

I haven't posted for nearly 2 weeks...when we aren't busy working or recording, we've been thinking about / praying for / or visiting our niece Fontainne.

Fontainne is our beautifully brave ballerina. Fourteen and fighting scoliosis, she has complained very little. Even now, after having 2 surgeries in 5 days, she spends her waking time trying to make her doctors and nurses smile. She's great. Her first surgery lasted for 8 hours! Yuk. There were some complications, so Tuesday she had to go back under the knife for about 2 hours. She is recovering and really enjoys the lunch-time visits from her uncle Al who only works a short bus ride away from the Children's hospital.

I don't know where my camera has been lately! I wish I had pictures of us with Fontainne and of our recording sessions!

Last night we had another recording session with Eric Lovre--we are having a grand time recording! I have a little cough that is bugging me and messing up my voice, so Alex did some extra vocal parts for Corridor. He wanted a really saturated distorted sound for his second vocal track, so Eric set him up with a neat-0 vintage microphone from the '30s and ran it through a groovy old tube pre-amp from the '60s. (I wish I had gotten a picture!) We got a great sound with the pre-amp overdriven. We only have my second vocal part to record on Corridor, and we'll be ready to mix it! We have yet to record vocals on either Pacific Shores or Over the Mains, but I think we'll be recording again this weekend.

Oh--the loopy loops. That's where I was going with all of this.

Before we started sub-mixing Over the Mains, Alex had Eric dump the individual tracks onto a CD so that he can play around with a dub remix on the computer. The other day we were hanging out in Fontainne's hospital room while her parents took a breath-air. She had just gone through a really tough ordeal and was tranq-ing out on some drugs. As she slept, we we became increasingly aware of subtle rhythmic sounds originating from Robot Fontainne. On a future visit, Alex brought his laptop and a cheesy karaoke mic to capture the tiny techno beats. He found some killer sounds: Fontainne has these special shoes she wears that are hooked up to some kind of water or air pressure machine to massage her feet (prevents blood-clots?). It sounds really creepy. He also found that her morphine pump produced a great sound that could be looped. Once Alex has massaged the beats into the song, we should have a pretty rad remix.

Remix name ideas:

The Power Tool Mix
Life-Support Loops
The Shriner Mix
Over the Mains / Under the Influence
Over the Mains / Under the Knife
The Drug Dub

whaddya think?