We’re adding another entry in our ‘From The Vault’ series. ‘From The Vault’ is where we scour our old hard drives and CDs to find songs that we wrote and recorded preliminary versions of but for various reasons never made a full studio recording. ‘Overboard’ was recorded live at ChurchHouse studios. The song has vocals, guitar, bass and drums. We made the recording with everyone in the same room. The guitar amp was placed in a separate room to keep the sound from bleeding through to the other mics. The bass went directly in to a pre-amp then the mixing board. We would usually have some sound barriers around the drums to cut down on the bleed through to the vocal mic. For songs like this we didn’t typically do any punch ins because the idea is to capture the essence and parts of the song and we didn’t want to worry about the ‘small things’. This song has been around in various forms for quite a while. It started out as a guitar practice routine. I always liked the sound of creating a chord figure on the guitar and moving it up and down the neck while leaving a number of strings open. You can do this with a normal guitar tuning or by using various ‘open tunings’. Using open tunings (something other than the standard E-A-D-G-B-E) allows you to create a variety of sounds and chord structures that you might not be able to physically do on a guitar in standard tuning. All these little changes can enhance your creativity. The photos are from Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park.
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