Tower Demo CD - recorded Fall of 1997

The pics on the images webpage are from the summer of 1997 when my drummer buddy Scott Kelly, myself, and bass player Shawn Tolman got together to record a demo. The project started off with Scott and I simply wanting to record some of the original songs we'd jammed on over the years, but we heard about Shawn through the grapevine so we asked him if he'd like to help out. We all got together at a local rehearsal studio and knew right away that there was something right about the combination. We initially worked up 10 songs, but we had set ourselves a deadline and by the time it rolled around only 6 of the songs were polished enough to record so... we rented a Tascam 238 8-track recorder, mixer and mics, and borrowed a DAT recorder from the rehearsal studio owner and spent the next two weeks recording the drums, bass and guitar tracks at the rehearsal studio. All of the master tapes had already been "striped" with a SMPTE signal on the end track (track 8) so we could easily synchronize any keyboards, samples or sequences later on which were "recorded" on a PowerBook 540c using MasterTracks Pro 6. This little trick sure sped up the next stage, where the keyboards were added in. We had hoped that by this point we might have found a vocalist to put down the lead vocals, but none appeared, so yours truly ended up adding lead and harmony vocals to 3 of the tracks. The last week of the project was spent mixing... and mixing... and mixing, until finally we had a finished product, mastered to the DAT, and ready for burning to a CD master. And lastly, the CD's cover art is a photograph I took from a moving car along Highway 401 here in Ontario. I had never intended this photo to be used this way (I was just intrigued by the power lines) but in searching for a picture for the CD cover it seemed fitting, especially since we wouldn't have to pay anyone for it! The whole project was a lot of work, but a lot of fun, and an experience I will never forget.

I recently received an email (Thanks Ed!) asking about guitar sounds and how the demo was recorded. Here's my response:

The recording was done on old-school gear which was pretty hip stuff at the time (1997). A Tascam 238 8-track cassette deck and a 16 channel mixer did all the hard work, and then it was mixed down to a DAT, which was *really* hi-tech stuff for a band like ourselves at the time! From the DAT a buddy helped me make a CD master and from there I could burn as many CDs as we needed.

The basic rhythm guitar sound is a home-made strat with a Seymour Duncan PAF and Floyd Rose ala EVH pumped through a Peavey Rockmaster Tube preamp and then into an old Marshall plexi head. When we practiced I never had the Marshall running over 3 on the Volume, but when we recorded I put the Marshall out in our practice room and ran it at 9 so it would give me plenty of sustain and natural feedback. Slammed a SM57 right up on the cabinet and that was it for the recording process. One more thing about the guitar; I found an old MXR Pitch Transposer rack in a Music Store that sells used stuff and I used it the same way EVH uses his Eventides to put a nice thick chorus effect on for most of the rhythm guitar parts. Really thickens it up.

Some pics I dug up of my guitar rig at the time:

Any other effects (delay, reverb etc.) were from a Roland DEP-5 rack and an Alesis Microverb. Shawn used my MXR pitch transposer rack on his bass for the fretless bass effect in the intro to Waking Dream. The MXR Flanger pedal you see in the pics above was not used on the recording. For all of the songs the guitar rhythm tracks were recorded twice for even more doubling/thickening and the guitar solos were recorded on their own track or on an unused rhythm guitar track right up the middle. Drums were submixed using the main mixer down to 2 channels (left and right) and the bass was D.I. straight into the board. The synthesizers (Roland Jupiter 6 and Roland D110) were "recorded" using a SMPTE track on track 8. All of the cassettes we used were striped with SMPTE code so I could lock my computer's sequencer program to the tape. I recorded all of the synth parts while listening to the bed tracks and then let the tape and the computer play them back. Vocals were recorded with the SM57 on it's own track. Tracks ended up like this:

• TRACK 1: vocals
• TRACK 2: rhythm guitar left & guitar solos
• TRACK 3: rhythm guitar right
• TRACK 4: guitar solos and/or background vocals
• TRACK 5: drums Left
• TRACK 6: drums Right
• TRACK 7: bass guitar
• TRACK 8: SMTPE CODE STRIPE

All of the bed tracks were recorded with the drummer listening to a basic click track (provided by my computer synced to the SMPTE code on track 8) and scratch guide tracks of the bass player and myself playing on a couple of tracks so the drummer could have a frame of reference for the songs structure. Then the bass tracks were recorded, then guitar, then vocals, then synth. Recording the synths last meant we wouldn't have the synths masking any of the vocals. The recording took about a month and the mixdown took a week.