We had an amazing studio night last night, due in part to some special guests.  Jeff Beam, who we’ve known for years, and who is an amazing bass player, joined us for part of the evening.  He brought along his muse Natalie as well, and we caught up for a bit before we settled into making some music.

The jamming was extra special because K Billy and Jeff played in a Cleveland band in the ’90s called Qynne’s Horse.  This marked the first time that they were writing together in years!

It was a blast.  Prior to Jeff’s arrival Mike, KB and I had written a bridge for an upcoming song called “Today Special”.  We were pretty happy with our efforts, but after Jeff showed up we gave the whole thing another shot and came up with what could be an even better idea.

The idea juice was working last night, I’ll tell you!

BTW, if you’re in Cleveland you can catch Jeff playing out with Calabash, the GeezeCats, Alan Greene and more.  And he’ll be playing in the Mike Farley Band reuinion show at Brother’s Lounge on Sunday July 25.

In December 1999 I met @hellpellet, the flaming pill that would change my life.

A little more than a year later, in early 2001, my grandmother passed away, devastating me.  A month after that I (along with about 101 other people) was laid off from my job.

I moved in with hellpellet across town and spent a while with my head deep in the sand.  Then there was 9/11, and everything seemed to be out of control everywhere.

At about that time I wrote this song based on a riff that Mike and I had come up with earlier.  It’s about being able to get through the day because hellpellet and I have each other for support when things get rough.  It’s become an anthem for me, but it’s also a gift for her and anyone else who is just keeping their head above water.

Special thanks to Coach Hanna for delivering the drums that made the song come alive.

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We had a productive studio night on Thursday.  We’ve got a handful of tunes that we’ve been working on that are on heavy rotation in our heads.  One of these songs is going by the working title of “Reigning”.

When we’re jamming without a drummer we usually run some kind of click or drum pattern in the background.  It keeps us together, and later it lets us build demo drum tracks with audio loops or MIDI drums or whatever percussion thing we want to use.

Sometimes we adjust the tempo of the click to fit what one or the other of us is playing.  For example, let’s say that Mike has a riff that he left himself in a voice mail (which happens a lot).  When he throws it out, he plays it at a particular tempo that feels right to him.  So we’ll match the tempo of the click to his playing, using tap tempo on one of the various and sundry pieces of gear in the studio, or on someone’s iPhone.  There’s an app for it. Shocker.

So, in the case of “Reigning”, we wound up jamming at 77 BPM (beats per minute). At the time it felt good, but we might have been impaired at that juncture.  Like the guys at Should I Drink That, as the night goes on we get a little, ahem, loose:

A couple weeks later, we tightened up the arrangement, built some demo drum tracks using ACID, and re-recorded some stuff.  It was starting to sound decent.  For some reason, though, the tempo started to seem a little… plodding.

What to do?  We had already recorded some pretty good tracks that we were hoping to keep.  If we changed the tempo, we’d have to re-record all of that.

As a test, we used a time compression/expansion plug-in to take a mix of the song from 77 BPM to 80 BPM.  You wouldn’t think so, but that little 3 beats per minute change made a big difference in the feel of the song.  We chewed on it for a little bit, and finally settled on 79 BPM.  It still keeps the pounding rock vibe, but tightened everything up in a way that is subtle, but noticeable.

So last night KB and I dropped new guitar tracks to the sped up version of the demo drums.  We added a little more instrumentation and reorganized some of the song structure.  Now all we have to do is have Mike re-record the bass part (we compressed his bass part to the correct tempo for recording purposes last night), and finish the lyrics.

We’re feeling a kind of Robert Plant lyric vibe – you know, like Middle Earth mystical (wait, let me get my 12-sided die), or epic mythical journeys.  Or some crap like that.  We’ll see where the idea juice takes us, and we’ll post the whole thing when we’ve got it about done.

Until then, here’s a snip showing the difference that 2 BPM can make.

Hey, happy leap day. I guess it is a special day. But that isn’t what this post is about.

We had a really enjoyable studio night last night. After what seemes like years of mixing and mastering, we’ve finally started to get back to the fun part: making new music.

We’ve got a storehouse of riffs that we’ve amassed over the years. Lots of the musical ideas have come from teensy little pieces of really long jams that we’ve recorded. Other ideas have dropped, fully-formed, out of our heads and hands. Generally that’s what we start with.

Last night for example, we recorded some general noodling around. We set up a simple session in Pro Tools and let it run while we fired up different rhythms on the trusty Dr. Groove drum machine and improvised. We weren’t really coming up with anything that was rocking our collective world, so we changed tacks (keeping the jams, of course, we might find something inspring in there after all).

We pulled up an old riff called “today special”, named for a sign that used to hang in our favorite east-side Chinese food take out place. We had created the jam at Mike’s place immediately after setting up his “remote” studio, which is a kind of stripped down affair. We recorded directly into Acid (we only did the acid 10 times… uh, I mean ONE time, man) and posted it online so I could drag it into my system and goof around with it.

We almost lost the whole idea, forgetting that it was out there in cyberspace. I thought about it much later and wondered where it had gone. Fortunately I found it, or the idea would have been completely lost – a very frustrating thing, and something that I’ll probably touch on in another post sometime.

In any event, we pulled it up last night and found that it fit our mood quite nicely (r&b funky, which seems to vie with heavy-duty rock for our attention). After monkeying around with it for a while we came up with what could be a good chorus, and stripped down the verse a little. As always, it’s going to continue to evolve until we reach the final product, but that’s the really wicked cool part of the creative process. When it’s done it may have changed from the original so much that it’s only got a passing resemblance, but we’ll have ourselves a new DD69 tune.

Once or twice a week we get together to work on new songs and to mix or master songs we’re planning to release. Sometimes we even rehearse on studio night. We should probably do that more often.

Tonight Mike and Scott sat down to finish the last track of an upcoming tune, and wound up writing something totally new instead. As of late, that’s highly unusual, but a welcome surprise.

Because we took about 8 years to record, mix, master and manufacture our first record since starting dd69, it’s weird that we’re working on new stuff. Honestly, the “new” stuff isn’t even new – it’s three or four years old. We’re on a three or four year lag between new material and stuff we’re actually working on. Well we’re trying to finally get it together. Better late than never, right?

Anyway, we recorded a couple tracks of us clapping for a song called “Wigs-N-Liquor”. It’s a song that blends all of the things we’ve come to know as drunkdude: a funky backbone riff; a juicy rock chorus; a bridge that we can’t really explain; vocals with soulish harmonies. All it needed before we could start mixing were claps.

As we did our clappage, Mike was suddenly struck with an idea for a new song. We literally shut the book on “Wigs” and started to record bits of the idea. We wound up importing it into Acid, where we mixed and matched a number of loops to try to flesh out the idea.

All in all, it was a good studio night, and idea juice was enjoyed by all. Apparently this time it worked. Again.