Discography : Breaking The Ice

Total # copies pressed : 48 (5) [-1]
© ℗ 2004 O-Yo Records

Notes: This record was in the planning stages as early as fall 2000... one early alternate title was "After The Fire" and cover art was even rudimentally produced featuring pictures from the apartment fire... the final cover photo was found sometime in mid-2001 and "Breaking The Ice" stuck... initial recording began on the band's computer using studio software in January 2001 until March 2001 but it was destroyed in the fire... recording began again in October of 2001 until January 2002 (albeit extremely inconsistently) but was scrapped when we realized we needed a stand-alone recording studio for better sound... recording began once again on what would become the finished product in July 2002 after the band purchased the studio in April of that year (took 'em a few months to figure out how to work it)... I don't own a bass guitar, but there is "bass" on the record, but it's just me playing guitar on a specific guitar setting (using the studio effects) that is more "bassy" and I finger the string like a bass (most of the time) - it doesn't pack the punch of real bass, but it sounds ok to me... there are 5 songs with programmed drums on this record (tracks 1,4,6,8,&11) and the others don't mostly because the studio doesn't allow for changes in tempo in the middle of a programmed drum song, so whenever there's a change in the song that isn't the same beat-per-minute as the last progression, it's impossible to change the beat tempo (it royally sucks and we didn't know you couldn't do that when we bought it)... there are actually two songs with drums (tracks 1 & 11) that have changes in tempo, but it took a whole boatload of effort to get it to work; we made two extra songs that were drum-only parts, LINED them out into the computer and recorded them as .WAV files and then LINED them back into the recorder as separate tracks in the mix, essentially as an extra instrument, and then programmed the rest of the song's drums around "space" in the song that was filled by the extra drum track. yeah, it was a pain in the ass... in fact, for track #1 we had to have separate extra drum tracks for the snare/hi-hats & bass drum because for some reason the kick wasn't high enough in the regular mix... so the only songs that will be recorded in the future with drums will either be one-tempo songs or songs with off-tempo drumless parts or where we LINE in the extra drums like previously mentioned; thus there will probably only be a handful of drummed songs per album... since by the time this record was being made (the third and final time) we had over 30 songs written, the 12 songs on it were hand-picked (mostly for thematic reasons) and no other songs were recorded, though others were considered, including "The Beginning's End", "Seeing The Green" and "Watching The Clock" but another batch of 12 songs (including those 3 and again, thematically related) was hand-picked for the to-be-recorded 2nd album, already titled (w/ cover art) by summer '01 and tracklisted by mid-2002... I told Tres I wanted him to come and play sax on a track on the record sometime during the summer of 2003 but he laughed it off and it took several more serious and insistent requests of mine to get him to finally show up, but it was well worth it as the session with him that night was a hell of a lot of fun, and incidentally it occurred literally three days before the entire album was completely mixed and mastered... when it comes to recording myself, I have two big pet peeves - being misunderstood lyrically, and being too loud in the mix vocally. As you can imagine this makes it difficult because those things are in opposition to each other. I very badly want anyone listening to be able to hear what I'm saying, but I also really, really hate dominating a song with my voice. I spent about an hour or two mixing each song, but I could have easily spent a week on each tune and still have things to tweak. I'm normally an indecisive person so it was quite a feat - for me - to accept (or should I say 'concede') the final mix... if you look closely in the pictures of the album artwork, there is one major typo (ommitted letter) that I didn't catch until after I had printed up 26 copies of the booklet...