BB's New Recordings

Hello people,
On April 1, 2006 Eleni and I recorded our new album Other Places. We took a six hour drive to Atlanta and recorded at Zero Return Studios. I want to first say that the people at Zero Return Studios are fantastic, down to earth and easy to work with: www.zeroreturnstudios.com. They create analog sound recordings. We recorded 15 songs in two days. The drums and guitar were recorded live. Jim (who engineered the album and is in the picture to the left) isolated the guitar amps and we did some overdubs of lead guitar, bouzouki, keyboards and vocals on some songs. Jim is old school and has been recording bands since 1971. He is the best recording engineer I have ever worked with. When recording, I usually get very nervous doing my parts and sometimes things don't go very well. It didn't happen this time. Jim seemed to set this easy going environment. They have this great collection of instruments. Eleni played all the keyboard parts on the album. She used this 1960's Hamond organ on the Song Ossuary. I love the tone this thing makes! I can't spill all the beans. I'll let Eleni go into more detail about that on her blog Binge Cafe. On the song One Day to Walk Through I used a 1965 Ampeg Reverbaracket for the solo. I didn't use any pedals for that song. We turned up the Reverbaracket as loud as it would go to get the slight distortion I wanted for the solo. The sliding door behind me is where the guitar amps are isolated. I like to use my custom telecaster for all my guitar parts. It's a real clean sounding guitar. On the song Gray Fingers I use my Larrivee acoustic through a Blues driver distortion pedal. It's a muddy sound that works well for me. After working with Analog I'm not going to go back to digital recording. We own our own digital studio and it can be cool to record yourself, but it is of my opinion that Analog is better way to go and more honest. We are going to use our digital set up, as a tool to make rough drafts of the songs and to record practices. I would rather play music and not try to make it all perfect on the computer. I'm not putting down people who do that. It's just not for me. I'm going to leave it to the professionals like Jim to record us. Jim doesn't own a computer.
Thanks Jim