We’ve been taking a little hiatus from live shows to focus on our album. Well, the hiatus is coming to a stop real soon!
Just so you know how it goes, here’s a typical 5-step album creation process: Write, Pre-Production, Production, Mix, Master
People call things by different names, but this is pretty much the same for bands of every kind:
Write – This is self-explanatory. We wrote 10 songs for this album. We actually wrote more than 10, but these were the ones that we wanted to share with the world the most. We know a lot of acappella groups focus on cover songs, but everything has been covered and we like writing our own music too! We did record one cover song though, that we think you'll love! You'll love it so much that we think you'll play it on Repeat over and over again.
Pre-Production – This is where you prepare so that you’re not in the studio standing in front of a microphone with that stunned look on your face, like you do when you’re reading an online blog. Yeah, that one on your face right now. ;) You gotta be ready and know how everything’s gonna roll. So this basically means that Mike locks us in a house and chains the door shut for a few days until we emerge ready.
Production –This is where we actually press the record button a million times and move-shift-nudge stuff around. Sometimes we’re recording together but sometimes, just one or two people are in there at a time. And we’re not actually pushing the record button ourselves. Hill Kourkoutis does – she’s our Producer, who besides hitting the record button is guiding us and making musical suggestions.
When you’re a solo artist it’s one thing, but when you’re a band, you have to all agree to put your trust in one person – the Producer – and you’re handing a degree of creative control over to them. It’s scary to say, because our songs are our babies, but we trusted Hill to nanny our little creations.
Hill is short for Hillary, if you’re curious. Kourkoutis is often mispronounced but she says it as “kerr KOO tis”. Joe calls her The Incredible Hilk™.
We can’t tell you how great Hill was to work with. She kept Stacey calm. She amped Luke up. She tweaked the rest accordingly too.
Mix – This is where you push “that voice up and this voice down”. It’s like the audio version of the hokey-pokey dance. It sounds easier than it is and we’re over-simplifying it a hundred-fold. It takes about a day per song to get the first draft done and another few hours once we all give our feedback. Although Hill is still involved in an advisory capacity at this stage, the heavy lifting gets moved over to Brandon Unis at Cylinder Sound. We’ve worked with Brandon before so we knew the awesomeness he was going to bring to our ears. As of this moment, he has finished 8 of 11 songs. He gets an 8 out of 8 so far!
Master – At this stage Brandon gets to breathe a little. Now he and Hill act in an advisory capacity and the torch gets passed to a magician named Brett Zilahi from João Carvalho Mastering. Janet & Joe have worked with Brett in the past. Actually, Brett introduced us to Hill, so that’s how we found her in the first place! Brett’s job is intricate but he basically takes what Brandon did and fiddles with eq and compression and volume and makes sure it will sound the same on all different kinds of stereo systems – from big sound systems to little earbuds.
Then we’re done with all that noise. Literally. But of course, there is CD cover art and we got to put the lyrics inside and order them and they take weeks to arrive. So we’re planning on a late May 2014 release date. We’re pretty excited about it!
And here’s the best part of this album. Usually near the end of it, bands are googling their local laws to see how many years they’ll be imprisoned for if they commit a homicide. But that didn’t happen this time and we’re in the 4th stage. What is going on here?!
Just so you know how it goes, here’s a typical 5-step album creation process: Write, Pre-Production, Production, Mix, Master
People call things by different names, but this is pretty much the same for bands of every kind:
Write – This is self-explanatory. We wrote 10 songs for this album. We actually wrote more than 10, but these were the ones that we wanted to share with the world the most. We know a lot of acappella groups focus on cover songs, but everything has been covered and we like writing our own music too! We did record one cover song though, that we think you'll love! You'll love it so much that we think you'll play it on Repeat over and over again.
Pre-Production – This is where you prepare so that you’re not in the studio standing in front of a microphone with that stunned look on your face, like you do when you’re reading an online blog. Yeah, that one on your face right now. ;) You gotta be ready and know how everything’s gonna roll. So this basically means that Mike locks us in a house and chains the door shut for a few days until we emerge ready.
Production –This is where we actually press the record button a million times and move-shift-nudge stuff around. Sometimes we’re recording together but sometimes, just one or two people are in there at a time. And we’re not actually pushing the record button ourselves. Hill Kourkoutis does – she’s our Producer, who besides hitting the record button is guiding us and making musical suggestions.
When you’re a solo artist it’s one thing, but when you’re a band, you have to all agree to put your trust in one person – the Producer – and you’re handing a degree of creative control over to them. It’s scary to say, because our songs are our babies, but we trusted Hill to nanny our little creations.
Hill is short for Hillary, if you’re curious. Kourkoutis is often mispronounced but she says it as “kerr KOO tis”. Joe calls her The Incredible Hilk™.
We can’t tell you how great Hill was to work with. She kept Stacey calm. She amped Luke up. She tweaked the rest accordingly too.
Mix – This is where you push “that voice up and this voice down”. It’s like the audio version of the hokey-pokey dance. It sounds easier than it is and we’re over-simplifying it a hundred-fold. It takes about a day per song to get the first draft done and another few hours once we all give our feedback. Although Hill is still involved in an advisory capacity at this stage, the heavy lifting gets moved over to Brandon Unis at Cylinder Sound. We’ve worked with Brandon before so we knew the awesomeness he was going to bring to our ears. As of this moment, he has finished 8 of 11 songs. He gets an 8 out of 8 so far!
Master – At this stage Brandon gets to breathe a little. Now he and Hill act in an advisory capacity and the torch gets passed to a magician named Brett Zilahi from João Carvalho Mastering. Janet & Joe have worked with Brett in the past. Actually, Brett introduced us to Hill, so that’s how we found her in the first place! Brett’s job is intricate but he basically takes what Brandon did and fiddles with eq and compression and volume and makes sure it will sound the same on all different kinds of stereo systems – from big sound systems to little earbuds.
Then we’re done with all that noise. Literally. But of course, there is CD cover art and we got to put the lyrics inside and order them and they take weeks to arrive. So we’re planning on a late May 2014 release date. We’re pretty excited about it!
And here’s the best part of this album. Usually near the end of it, bands are googling their local laws to see how many years they’ll be imprisoned for if they commit a homicide. But that didn’t happen this time and we’re in the 4th stage. What is going on here?!
Anyway, that’s it for now. We’re excited for May to arrive so you can hear this! It’s going to be fun!
