Delta Spirit: Recording a New Album

I left the East Bay last night and made the 1 hour drive up towards Napa/Sonoma/Santa Rosa to visit my old friends in Delta Spirit. I arrived around dinner time. Jon was talking on the phone with his lady, Matt was recording a vocal track, Brandon was nowhere to be found, and Kelly was making dinner. Guess which one I settled in with first? That’s right — the guy with the grub.

After a magical dinner of salad and spicy sausages, Kelly picked some mint from outside and made us all Mint Juleps. Then, we cruised over to the studio where Kelly overdubbed a guitar part. Following this, it was Brandon’s turn to lay down a booming single drum track. Two problems: 1) Jon managed to break the single mallet they owned while recording another track earlier in the week. 2) Brandon’s kick drum was a little out of tune.

Step 1: make a new mallet. We toyed around with grabbing the mallet from a kick pedal, but that was a bit unwieldy to handle. So we did what any rational musician would do — we used a sock. We grabbed a drum stick, Brandon donated one of his socks, and we duct taped that thing together. Wah-lah! Insta-mallet.

Step 2: we needed to tune the kick drum. What’s that you say? Tune a drum? Why yes. Drums produce actual notes when they resonate. Don’t look at me like that — it’s true. I remembered an old trick from my glory days: headphones can be used for “reverse transduction.” Basically, you can use the actual speakers in the headphones to convert (transduce) the acoustic sounds into an electrical signal. It’s basically the reverse flow of what headphones are designed to do (side note: I’ve also seen this done for recording a kick drum once. Rather than using a microphone, someone placed a Yamaha NS-10 speaker right next to the kick drum, and ran the output into the tape machine. Crazy.) So we placed the headphones in particular spots on the drum, then ran the headphone cable into a tuner. We first put the drum into Eb — the root of the key for the song. Too high for such a big drum. We dropped down to a 4th? Too low and made the drum sound bleh. Major 3rd below? Perfect.

Here’s a incredibly grainy, crappy cellphone clip I took of Brandon beatin’ the drum:

I’m really excited for these new tunes: I think they represent the perfect balance of progression and improvement for them, along with sticking to the raw sound that people have come to love.

Good luck on the rest of the record, gents — I can’t wait to hear the finished product.