Mr. Kithcart lays down sweet Rhodes tracks in a late night session. Jake recorded his main, “Meat ‘n’ Taters”, parts to the mix and added some interesting new tricks to the album too.  We took Fender Rhodes to the next level on this session with distortion, modded wha pedal and a screamin’ JC120!  Fear not, no one was hurt (badly). We are scheduled for a another round this weekend. The Dilla has some big plans for the rest of the keyboard parts on this album. Did someone say ARP…Hammond…?

Bass Tracks: DONE

After an intense 4 hour tracking session with Mr. Starnes all bass parts are complete. Philip chose a sweet Fender Jazz for the task.  The Jazz bass has a nice array of sounds and It really helped to shape the low end for this album.

Taking the time to mirror Billy’s guitar riffs can prove to be challenging but Philip nailed every one and earned his honorary riff-meister merit badge! We also played around with  a  ”phase adjuster” from Little Labs. It took some time to tweak the mic placement in conjunction with the phase adjustment to find the sweet spot(s), in the end we were very pleased with the sound. Oh, and did I mention we ran everything through a Portico 5012…tasty!

Next up, Keys.

Just finished a productive seven hour recording session. Wrapped up all vocal tracks! It was a marathon task and Billy seems to have the ability to do three separate takes, of each lyric part, all of which sound exactly alike. Glad to have the vox behind us now.

We also created a formula for “Thunder Tom.”  It’s top secret information but does involve a hi hat… Eitel is taking the tom tracks back to the Commonwealth Studio for editing. Meanwhile, bass, keys and guitar(s) are in the cross-hairs.

Laying it down at the ArtPost "Ultralab"...Thanks to everyone!

We recently completed our drum tracks inside a giant Quonset hut in east Austin. We setup shop early on a Saturday and had everything tracked by 3pm…GO EITEL!

It was a tricky session with its fair share of hick-ups and technical difficulties though none of these had anything to do with drumming. Eitel put the smack down and we got it all on tape…or hardrive.  After a little tweaking we’ll be ready to lay some AXE!

We’d like to give a shout to all the fine people at the Ultralab who gave up there Saturday to allow us to make some noise in your space. Special thanks to Jim for taking some mighty fine photographs of this session.  More photos from this session to come.

The spark to record our new album comes from 3 years of shaping, writing, sweating it out in a cramped rehearsal space, going through periods of suspended animation, adding two members and playing the biggest show of our careers. Then, head back to the practice space with some new ideas and direction for the new four piece.

In the midst of a new wave of material we decided to put a nail in songs that got us to this point. The riffs that were pounded out of stone to fuel the Dilla in it’s first few years. We’ve decided to re-release some songs on our Self Titled release because they have grown a lot and have, in some cases, turned into new animals all together.  We expect to deliver this project before the summer.  Stay tuned for more on this and other Dilla news…