Brick's Comments on the new album: June 08, 2008
We finally have started recording the new album. We entered Soularium studio in Alpine, Utah on May 23rd to begin setting up all of our gear. It took 18 mics just to cover John's drum kit. We started tracking on May 24th and one week later we were done with drums and bass. All we were recording at Soularium was drums and bass, and all of the guitar and vocal tracks recorded there were just scratch tracks to use as references. Jerry has most of the keyboards ready, he just has some small tweaks to make here and there. One thing is for certain, this album is long. It was pretty overwhelming for John and Eric to play that much music in a week's time. Bottom line is that we ended up with some killer drum and bass tracks and John and Eric did an amazing job. Now it is my turn. Tony (our brilliant engineer) and I spent 5 days transferring and assembling the files from Soularium into Tony's Cubase system. Most of the music gets recorded in fairly small chunks. Often times when the music changes tempo (which happens frequently in Hourglass) we record each section with a new tempo as a separate chunk. Tony and I finally assembled all of those chunks together and the songs are in their proper order now.
Guitars will start on June 10th and it will take a while. I usually double, triple, or even quadruple my guitar parts just to make sure they sound big and full. I think I counted that I have 18 solos on this album so just doing leads will take me a couple of days. Michael will begin vocals shortly after I start guitars, and vocals always take some time. You have to get them just right and then there are all the backup harmonies, and lots of doubling to do as well. Looks like Eric will be singing quite a few backup parts.
We hope to have the album out in August. Mixing the album will take Tony and me a couple of weeks at least. I hope to be done with guitars in about two weeks and we will see where Michael is at with vocals. If all works out as planned (which it never does) August will see "Oblivious to the Obvious" released.