There’s a reason why my recent release, Somewhere in the Bell Curve, had eight songs on it.

Prior to the commencement of the sessions, I prepped demo stems for eight songs specifically because it was the number of songs that I felt we could comfortably cut drum tracks for in two long nights. That matters, because there are economic and practical concerns to be considered.

Recording drums is an involved process. A drum kit is not really just one instrument, but a number of individual instruments culled together. Each needs to be properly tuned and sometimes muffled or dampened. The studio engineer has to prepare the live room and set up the kit for the session, and there are usually ten to twenty microphones surrounding the drums. And then behind the board, each of those mic feeds have to be checked for levels, making sure they properly capture the sound while not “bleeding” too much from mic to mic. All that stuff happens before the drummer—me in this case—even sits down and plays a note.

All that stuff takes time and, therefore, money. So it makes the most economic sense to try to book a couple nights back to back, carefully scheduled on days where the studio doesn’t have to use the live room for a different client during the day. This way, you can keep the gear set up overnight and save time and money on day-two by skipping all the prep work and just getting down to business.

So that’s why I’ll opt to do the amount that can be done in “two days of drums.”

Of course, those two days are only the start of things, and many, many more days—far more time than that—are spent on guitars and vocals and harmonies and leads and mixing and all that other good stuff.  But most of the other stuff doesn’t need to be as carefully planned in advance. You can just book isolated days, sometimes spread weeks apart (in my case), and work on what you need to without all the extensive set up. There’s more flexibility there. Sometimes we’ll decide the agenda in the moment on those non-drum days: “What do you feel like doing today?” the engineer will ask. “Do you feel up to working on some vocal harmonies, or should we continue with the guitar leads we started last time?”

Anyway… tonight I had a  rare summer Friday night free of gigging, and my wife didn’t want to go anywhere with me because, frankly, there was no place to go:

“You wanna go out somewhere?”

“Not really. I mean, where would we go?”

“I dunno…”

So I spent some time in my home studio/office, going through some things, trying some new songwriting (nothing landed), and then sort of laying out plans for the next recording. I’m kind of an ass for doing that, probably, because Somewhere in the Bell Curve just came out and I really should be figuring out ways to spread awareness of this one and working to get the word out. But I am not a salesman and I don’t really enjoy the process of doing self-promotion, so instead I focus on what I like to do… the creative part.

Lately I tell everyone I know who asks about the last recording, “I’ve decided I always want to be recording for the rest of my life. I want to always have a project going in the studio, even if it has to be spread out because of time and monetary concerns.” I want to have something simmering, even if it’s in the slow cooker.

So I started figuring on which batch of tunes I’d like to do next. Like the last record, I want the focus to be on stuff I’ve written recently. Every “artist” (that’s a pretentious word, but I’ll use it anyway for lack of a better one) gets most excited by his or her fresh, new stuff that’s on table. But I also have a jillion songs from yester-year, too, and it’s good to revisit some of them, too. Some I’m really fond of and they shouldn’t get the shaft simply because they were written a while back, right?

In going through candidates for the next group, I came across at least four contenders that are basically ballads that have no drums at all on them. I don’t know that I’d want to release an album with four ballads; that’s a bit much. But I do want these songs recorded. So that got me thinking… Keeping in mind the stuff I said above about drums being the pain-in-the-ass part, maybe I can easily “skip” the big “drum days” push with these four songs and just jump right into working on them at a more casual pace. And when those are done, then I can start the next proper “full band” recording sessions and add eight more songs on top of those four.

I might be dreaming, or thinking out loud a bit here. But it’s worth consideration.

If you have any thoughts, feedback, discussion points, etc., put ‘em down below. And thanks for reading either way, assuming you’ve made it this far since you’re reading this line.

And if you didn’t, I wouldn’t blame you for skipping all my long-winded musings. But then again, if you didn’t make it this far, you wouldn’t be here to read this last paragraph giving you my blessing for having skipped this. 😉 If a tree falls in the forest, indeed.