Songwriting and recording are not all emotion and mushy stuff. Nor are they fun 100% of the time. This page, and the links from it, will go into the technical aspects of this recording. Beware if you are not a musician or engineer. This stuff is boring! On the other hand, if you are interested in this sort of thing, I am sure you will get some good insights into how a production like this comes together. If you are also a songwriter or recording musician, there are invaluable hints.

100% of this album was recorded mixed and produced with the Roland VS-1680 Digital Audio Workstation. Minimal outboard gear was used. Mastering was done with Cakewalk, WAV plugins and Easy CD Creator.

• 16 Months in the making
• Approx. 2100 Hours of recording time
• Over 80 Hours of Mixing & Mastering
• 2 Soundcards
• 18 Sets of Guitar/Bass Strings (total)
• Recorded, mixed and mastered in 1 apartment, and 2 basements
• Over 3600 MB of Storage for 12 completed songs
• 1400 Miles on my car during mixing & mastering
• 2 Cars
• 3 Broken Guitar Strings
• 3 Three publishing houses for reprint rights
• 0 Record company executives to bring this to reality

• Lou had to come up from Florida for a week to do his parts.
• In May 1999 I had a car accident, effectively halting the project for a month.
• Anxiety attack in September really started to change my perception of things as I lay in the ambulance wondering...
• Hurricane Floyd threatened to delay further the hard work of my dedicated team.

After Mandala, I needed to do something stripped back (Cadillacs & Tarantulas). My present day technique combines the techniques used on Mandala with stripped down, acoustic-only recording, and adds loops/samples to the mix.

On drums... Right now I prefer sampled drums because they are more flexible. I wouldn't do live drums again without a real room, better mikes and an engineer. In fact, I might not do real drums on the Roland at all, but would prefer to record them elsewhere and then sync them up on the Roland later.

I use the Roland with my PC for MIDI and digital audio sync using Acid Pro and Cakewalk Pro Audio, but I'm running a Pentium II, so there's sometimes latency issues. I am looking forward to a Pentium 4 soon.The Roland's mike preamps and D/A converters aren't the best. They are good, but in my experience, I have had better results when using tube preamps and other off-board equipment. Preamps are necessary to get better signal to noise ratio, especially with acoustic guitar and voice.

Based on comparisons I've done with a few other artists using Roland products, my project was probably an 8 or 9 on a scale from 1 to 10.

I never felt that I truly pushed the Roland to its full limit. To do so would be unnecessarily complex. It's more machine than most people need, and if you are at a point where you DO need all of its features, you might be better off using a real studio. For example, the automation is decent, but if you really need that feature, there are better options on larger systems. Waveform editing is very tedious and inexact at best, and there's nothing like using a PC for that task.None of this is meant to detract from the Roland line of workstations. I'm simply much wiser and more realistic about how I approach my projects now. The Roland is integral to my writing and producing process.

Recording Journal (warning - this is rather boring and unedited)