London Calling

you dont know how many blogs i start and never finish. alot. finally gonna finish and post one. I'm currently in an internet cafe in downtown london. This is the first break i've taken from work since getting here. Me and Troy from Small Town Sleeper are in town recording. mostly vocals, some guitars. alot of polishing work, arranging, rough mixing, evaluating. Its been 12 to 16 hour days every day. Today we took a bit of a break to go enjoy downtown London for a while. ITs been very enjoyable. We'll have a nice dinner in the city with the bands label tonight then back to work all night tonight and a long day of work tomorrow. We've been here a week and a day now, since last friday. Sunday we go to Paris for 2 days of much needed vacation then right back to London to dig back into the record.

Troy has been giving better vocal performances than I've ever heard him deliver. Some really next level stuff that i think is going to really surprise long time listeners of the band and attract a whole lot of new fans as well, but then i suppose thats the goal. Too many great things to tell, so i'll just leave this as a general update and get it posted. I miss America, but i'm longing for Paris, it should be a very fun couple of days.

-Ken Lewis

Electric Lady Land

Yesterday (Monday Sept 18) i spent all day/all night recording with Small Town Sleeper at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. This studio is the former legendary home and studio of Jimi Hendrix, and has bared witness to countless classic albums over the years. We were booked at Electric Lady for a day a few weeks back and the Black Crows were in the room next to us, and J-Lo was in the upstairs room. Anyway, the studio has a very well earned, well deserved reputation, and I love it there. We tracked drums and bass there mostly, and some acoustic and electric guitar as well. Their live room is one of my favorite on the planet.

So, i really wanted to do a video blog from there, but the live room doesnt get enough light for my webcam to film properly, my apologies. As good as the drum sounds and acoustic guitar sounds have been that we've been getting here, there's just something that a live room like that gives you that you cant get elseware, of course its got a price tag to match, as their daily rates are steep, but worth every penny and then some.

I think i cut the best sounding acoustic guitar tracks ever yesterday. I was going for a totally different thing than when we've been cutting acoustics here. The tracks cut here are supposed to be layered guitars to thicken up big choruses or start off a song. The song i cut at Lady yesterday on acoustic was ONLY acoustic guitar for the whole song, so it needed to be a whole different thing, and it was. I mic'd it was a B&K 4007 omni-directional mic, put Troy in the center of the big live room, and the mic about 4 feet away, to give me a nice balance of room and direct (especially with the omni pattern). Then into an ADL 600 mic pre, then an LA2A compressor, and finally on the way into Logic Audio, i inserted one of those MAssenburg MDW EQ plugin's on the input. The room did have this kind of obnoxious resonance around 200 hz that needed to be dialed out of the sound, but once it was, everything tightened back up, and what was left was this beautiful, 3 dimensional, well defined acoustic guitar with a beautiful natural room reverb on it. I might post a brief clip for you soon to hear. its gorgeous. Anyway, a completely different recording approach, which only proves that there are a million ways to get great sounds, you just have to figure out what your going for, and find a way to get there.

- Ken Lewis

Video Blog #3 Part 2

I am uploading Video Blog 3 in two separate pieces. Dont forget to watch Part 1.

Enjoy!!

-Ken Lewis

Ken Lewis - Video Blog 3 - Part 2

Video Blog #3 Part 1

My sincerest apologies during my absence. I got so frustrated after spending so much time on the old Video Blog 3, finally finishing it, and then trying about twenty times to post it unsuccessfully. I finally gave up and have been too frustrated to blog lately, but i'm back, with an all new Video Blog 3. I hope.

I split this one into 2 parts and hopefully it will upload this time. I guess the only word of clarification to make is that all of the audio your hearing is the live mic on the webcam. So your not actually hearing any of the mics, and i'm just too swamped right now to post sound examples. Soon i hope i can start incorporating that stuff.

The Small Town Sleeper album is going super fantastic. We are at Electric Lady yet again on Monday doing more basic tracking on a few new songs, I'll try to do some video blogging at Electric Lady if i have time, which is not a definite.

Ken Lewis - Video Blog #3 - Part 1

Part 2 is posting now. Enjoy!!!

-Ken Lewis