Big Rock Candy Mountain
By admin • Feb 11th, 2010 • Category: Big Rock Candy Mountain, Features, Guest Editorials
In The Studio With Big Rock Candy Mountain
Our good friends at Reapandsow and Sideways Media are working on another project: releasing vinyl compilations of cover songs. So we headed to the studio in San Francisco to record our cover for the album. Mission Bells is a nice old studio tucked away in the Mission District, right above an Indian food restaurant. They have the Grateful Dead’s old tape machine as well as a wealth of great instruments and recording gear.
Meet Chuck Gonzalez- the friendly, incredibly talented, eclectic and reeeeeeeeelaxed studio engineer. We walked into the studio and Chuck handed Stephen (MacDonald, Bass/Vocals) an awesome Vox hollow body bass, and handed Andrew (Hartsock, Guitar) an old Les Paul plugged into a Fender Princeton. He then pointed Paul (Thibodeaux, Drums) in the direction of the perfectly tuned vintage Fibes drum kit, while I made a beeline for the Wurli. We immediately felt at home and were playing within 5 minutes of walking in the studio.
It felt so good to be creating music in a studio again and after playing through two different covers (“Bulls On Parade” by Rage Against The Machine and “Digital Love” by Daft Punk), we decided to go with the Daft Punk cover.
We got all of our instruments sounding good and then found our stride on the 4th take together. On to overdubs! We did vocals first and then started layering on backing vocals and beatboxing. We layered tambourine and shaker next. Then we started laying a doubled second drum track with some new fills to beef up the sound in certain sections. Two more doubled guitar parts and then it was in the can!
From the first take right until we were walking out of the studio, we were there for a total of three hours, which I would say is pretty great time. Chuck was absolutely wonderful and made us feel right at home. And more importantly, he made the drums sound extra buff and made the bass sound extra old. By the time we were done we were dancing around in the control room listening to the cacophony of noise we’d just made.
We’re looking forward to mixing it and showing people our Big Rock Candy Mountain-ified version of a great electronic tune.
Michael Girardot
Vocals/Keys
Big Rock Candy Mountain
February 2010
[...] Well its not a video or a song, but the boys of Big Rock Candy Mountain just got back from a West Coast tour. While they were there they went into the studio to record a cover for a compilation that reapandsow music & Sideways Media are putting out. They were asked to write a guest editorial about their experience by Revolt Media (coined “loudest blog on the internet,” which if you are familiar with BRCM you know how fitting that is). Now the editorial is live, and the boys are on the cover of the Ezine. You can read the editorial here. [...]