Played the first bass track tonight. What a rush it is to hear the song come alive with all of the parts in place.

The bass is the glue that holds it all together and it's a blast to lay down the groove on songs that you have never played bass on before.   I usually go through the song for about an hour or two and then I just hit record and let the groove fly.  When the studio chair starts rocking back and forth while you are recording the parts you know its in the groove!   The Amplitude Ampeg Plugins are my favorite.   That in conjunction with the DI track and the Avid Eleven Rack Z2 Crunch bass from the Eleven Enhancement pack.   The song tonight was "Bleed Your Name".  This song is my personal favorite at the moment.   I love this song and I think I have heard it over 40 times today and it gets better and better each time.   The piano parts Bret put down on this were spot on for the vibe.   The hard part on this one is going to be to capture the emotion of this song.  When I lay the vocal parts down on this one I better nail it!  There is no room for anything other than an A+ vocal.   The piano and strings really make the vibe feel like its a late 70's early 80's pop hit what one today might even call "Classic Rock" but either way you can't help but sing along on the tune.  The basic tracks are coming together nicely but what will make this thing fly is the electric guitar. The recording through a neumann U87, a massive UA tube compressor, Neve Console with some top shelf preamps and a great room for vocals will be the icing on the cake.  For some reason I think we may use some different instruments at the end of this recording because it feels like it needs a slide or ebow in the background but Bret will have the answer for sure.  I hope "Bones" will dig the bass parts I put down if not he's gonna have to jump in the mustang and drive down from the San Francisco.  Burning the midnight oil tonight!

I have literally recorded hundreds of songs and I have never felt so close to the material.   There is something going on here that you can't imitate and you can't fake.  There is an honesty in the songs that feels so real to me that the music business seems to have lost.  For me, the last few years of music has been a battle to find inspiration.  Bret and I took the approach that we were going to be as genuine as possible on this record and make "Our Record" that we have wanted to make for years if not our entire musical careers.  There is an incredible feeling that overcomes you when you realize that the music is about your life and the real emotions and experiences that you lived are genuine in the song.   We didn't hear anyoneelse's recording and just write a knock off or boiler plate set of songs, we wrote from the heart. There is simply no way to right something like this without having survived the "downside of life".  Lets just say that life has its ups and downs, its a roller coaster and you not supposed to stay in one place too long... Having said that, the life experiences that helped us write this record were epic battles and some of the hardest parts of our lives to date and these songs have a lot of meaning to us.   I really dig everything that's going on with this and I hope when Johnny Lima gets the demo's from pre-production that he will be blown away... Its pretty killer so far...Excited!

Bret is putting down some guitar as we speak... I bet its really loud over at "The Portal" Studio's
Digging the process either way and especially this one right now!  - Jimmy