We are currently recording our next album. Although Kevin and Jer have played with the band on and off for years, this is the first album we’ve written together. We’re enjoying the power-trio format, we’ve been playing together for a few years now and we’re very excited to be back in the studio.

We’re recording everything on a Phonic Helix firewire mixer. The drum tracks are run into a Mackie VLZ mixer first to take advantage of the warmer Mackie inputs. We are hardly EQing anything at all (a bit of low cut on the overheads) when recording, just spending lots of time on microphone selection and placement.

We’ve changed the drum mics out a few times during recording and you can hear it in the songs. We have changed to CAD mics on most of the drums (everything but the hat and overheads), they have a good midrange and the kick is really big while still retaining a nice attack (we were using an AKG D112 on the kick, but replaced it with a CAD KBM412). For a room mic we’re using a CAD E350 in omni, it really captures the room nicely while adding warmth.

We’re recording everything with Cakewalk Sonar HS 4. It has been glitch-free, all lost tracks have been because we forgot to unmute something or assign an input correctly. I created a template with all the tracks named and assigned; I also set the playback volumes, panning, and some compression so when we listen back it’s already mixed a little. I move the tracks to my home studio where I’m using Sonar 6 to mixdown and produce the tracks (read: fix my mistakes) with a Mackie firewire mixer. I’m really happy with it. Kevin wanted one, so I ran out and bought one first.

We do all the overdubs and additional tracks at my house (or Kevin’s, he has pretty much the same setup as I do). I have a TEAC Teac 85-16 reel-to-reel synced up to my computer (and a couple of tube mic preamps) so we can record or bounce to tape whenever we feel we need the big fat warm analog sound on a track. I’ve used CoolEdit Pro, ProTools, CuBase, and Vegas in the past, and I think Sonar is really versatile for a small to medium size project studio. I use it for recording and mixing as well as composing and arranging. It now incorporates aspects of SoundForge’s ACID software as well as extensive MIDI editing capabilities.