Recording sessions can be tough. I learned this over the long and arduous session that I just finished. It’s not always as simple as you would think. Throw a couple mics in the room and hit the red record button, right?

Then the fun stuff comes into play… After spending hours upon hours in a hot, steamy, dark room, huddled around a computer and countless other humming electro – toys with other stinky dudes who may or may not have bathed within the week (yourself included), agonizing and arguing over whether to use a dotted eighth note or sixlet feel to a 2nd bassline doesn’t really hold your attention the way it should. You lose focus. You forget that this recorded material is going to haunt you for a long time, for better or for worse… The hope is that it is a successful recording and will stick with you forever, but the fear is that, in the end, you won’t want it to.

Anyway, that’s why it is fun and important to change the pace and do something a little different once in a while. It lets the brain reset, and hopefully, if you are resourceful, you can still make something productive and unique out of it. In a couple weeks, when From Exile’s ‘Monolith’ is released, I’ll be getting into the gritty details of specific sounds on the record and where we were having fun.

Here’s an example; TOOL in the studio, annihilating a piano:

I loved this video because I had a similar run-in with a piano a couple years ago… It involved a pair of machetes and a bottle of whiskey, and although I do not have any video footage of this particular night (one, of many, that I probably should have been arrested), I did rip the ‘head off the dragon’, so to speak, and it resides at home with me to this day:

So, to my earlier point on recording experimentation, I had the opportunity to stop by my father’s shop and record some samples of buzz-saws and such for an as-of-yet-unnanounced project (TO BE RELEASED BY END OF YEAR!):

Here is some footage of us working with Eyal Levi on some experimental junk during the Monolith recording session (starts @ 1:38):

We were using key rings, a battlestation of delay pedals, and a glass pipe… bah, I guess I should stop there. I have a show tonight to prepare for!