Back in June, I spent two days recording music to be on a CD of a friend of mine in Omega Recording Studios in Rockville, Maryland. Despite the title of this thread, no, it was not rock music, but religious music--very good, original, modern religious music, but still all about God nonetheless. It was the first time I'd been a paid professional studio musician, complete with my own soundproof recording booth, headphones, and everything! Very exciting for me. The sound engineers called me a few times the week before each of the recordings and listed off the instruments I needed and then asked me if I needed anything else. I kept having to restrain myself from asking for a bowl of green M&Ms (just the green ones! And only 40 watt lightbulbs, please)...but I was good.
Anyway, like the dork that I am, I took some photos! So here they are.
This is my first isolation booth, with my "anvils" (as an aside, it's ironic to me that, as an agnostic/athiest, I got to play the part of the guy who nails Jesus to the cross for this Easter piece--that's what the anvil sound effect is). These are just lead pipes that supposedly sound better musically than an actual anvil, but they sounded like crap. That hammer is damn heavy too. Headphones are hanging off the mic, and I can't remember what that soundboard with all the knobs on it is called, but that's where I get to adjust everyone else's levels so I could either listen to them while they did their thing or kill them off like they were never born. Such a feeling of power.
That's the one I actually used to make the anvil sound. It isn't an anvil either; it's a piece of train track, but it sounded a hell of a lot better than the pipes (which at this point had been moved off the foam to the side since they all sucked). Ironically, real anvils tend to sound like shite as well since they don't resonate well, and they're insanely heavy, so not very practical either.
This is the front half of the main room, where the pianist (my friend/the composer) and the vocalists were stationed. Most of the time I killed the vocalists off in my headphones because they were a bit slow on their attacks, and one of them had an annoying pseudo-opera-singer kind of vibrato going on with her voice. Bleck.
This is the back half of the room where the vocalists were. Whee.
This is the isolation booth where I recorded 90% of what I did. It's set up right next to the main room, which was helpful so I could see Ed the pianist for downbeats at the start of the pieces (he doesn't do the head-nod thing to start pieces very well, so watching his hands works a lot better). Besides the snare and the anvil, I had a set of bells, a suspended cymbal, triangle, tambourine, djembe, woodblock, and...a couple of other toys that I don't remember anymore.
Heh. Yes, this photo is blurry. That's the mixing booth, and I was trying to be stealth and not be obvious in my supreme dorkiness of photographing my first studio adventure, and to do that I tried doing a timed exposure without a flash (since there was a glass door separating me in my booth from them in theirs). This was the result. Oh well.
The wall of CDs! All recording studios (I would guess) have this wall, showing off the albums that have been recorded there. Although Omega is a rockin' place, they didn't have that many artists y'all would recognize. I took photos of a couple of my favourites, though...
An Oskaloosa Christmas! A worldwide classic, to be sure.
The Capitol Steps, a fairly well-known (in the DC area, anyway) group, with another Christmas classic, "All I Want For Christmas is a Tax Increase."
Oh my God! A band you might've heard of! 2 Live Crew! Schweet.
And, although I know most of you think emo sucks, but I love Dashboard Confessional, and I was so excited to see that they'd recorded an album at Omega! Maybe they were in the same studio as me! So cool. Oh yeah.
So, that's the end of the tour. If you want me to play for you sometime, contact my agent.
Of course.
