I like recording at home quite a bit, but there's one thing I can't do here: record drums and vocals with big room sounds, which is something I enjoy. Just before Christmas, I did two days of recording at Unknown Recording Studio in Anacortes, WA with the band Lake. I had met them when I played at The Business, a record store in town, in 2017. They took me to the studio with engineer Nich, to pique my interest and invite me to come record there sometime. When my mom moved to the area, I decided to do just that.

On the Unknown website it says, "It sounds huge because it is huge." This proved to be true. Before the session, I was thinking of doing the final vocal takes live with the other instruments. As soon as I walked in and heard my voice in that room, I scrapped that idea because I wanted to get faraway mics to record the vocal without bleed from drums. These mixes were dashed off just to demonstrate in terms of the goal of this series of playlists - sharing thoughts on the recording process - what going to a studio with a great sounding room can offer. It is so important to see places like this surviving and thriving in the digital age.

In the picture, Eli Moore is on the left, who played bass, acoustic guitars, and sang backup. Andrew Dorsett is on the right, who played drums and keyboards. Nich is in the middle with his daughter. Eli, Andrew and I stayed at the studio. It was very cosy. A big part of the studio's vibe is its history as, formerly, a church, and still, a community center for Croatian immigrants who work/ed in the local fishing industry. The community center is in the lower level of the building still, though the church is not active anymore. After the church closed, a business was located there that made sails. You can still see the masking tape on the floor that they used to create templates for cutting the canvas to size.

There are posters in the isolation rooms on the left and right behind us that have posters of rocky landscapes in Croatia, which were aged but sill had robust colors. There were pictures in the halls in a few places of musicians of the Croatian community playing in the 1920's. On the way to lunch one day we ran into Bret Lunsford, who I knew of in the '80's as the guitarist of Beat Happening. He now works at the local Croatian library and has written a few books about the local community, which is where he grew up. I think he had something to do with starting the studio, although I don't think he's involved with it anymore, as Phil Elverum from the Microphones is. Anyways, Bret was really nice and we had a nice chat on the chilly street. I bought his book about Harry Smith being from the area at the Business later that afternoon. I wanted to get his other book, which Eli said is more about the Croatian community there, but Bret said it was currently out of print.

I made Rough Mixes number 1 for their reference when I got back to NC. Eli said he couldn't hear the bass. I was kinda embarrassed, cuz I knew that was kinda a noob mistake. I'm not used to mixing things at home that were recorded with full drum kit mic setups. By the time I get to that point, I've usually handed off the mixing to someone else. I forgot to apply perhaps the most basic of mixing skills, carving out space with EQ to separate the kick drum from the bass so they don't cancel each other out. I knew one should occupy more like 60 Herz and the other more like 80-100, but I forgot which was which.

Today I used this plugin I got for this purpose from Melda Productions called MultiAnalyzer to help make rough mix #2. It lets you see the sound waves from different tracks in one window, give them different colors, and watch them dance. There's a feature called something like overlap that shows you the overlapping frequencies. You then carve out some of that overlapping space on one or both of them, and voila, what's lost is found.

I was happy with the results and decided to go back there in late June to turn these two songs into a whole record. I'm going to use 7 or 8 of the songs from the November playlist to do that.

If you're looking for a place to record, I would really recommend this spot.