So from the annals of guerilla recording techniques we now come across the story about the Mexican rock band that I recorded on my TASCAM 424 cassette 4 track. It was right here in Oceanside a mile from where I live now. My good friend Matt Beck (drummer, patriot...good dude) lived one door over from these guys that had a Mexican heavy metal, heavy rock, whatever you want to call it. They always talked music when they would run into each other out in front of the house. You know...the old Oceanside style homes between the old drive-ins and Mike’s Liquor #2. They had a common interest that bonds musicians and us audio guys. We all like to talk shop and this is a common binding element for our ilk. Anyways....to make a long story long...they for some reason or another found themselves without a drummer. My buddy Matt who lived just one house over from these Mexican rockers had the thought that this could be a good opportunity to learn some Spanish, and being that the commute was less than fifty feet from his backyard that he should become the only whiteboy in a Spanish speaking Mexican heavy metal group. Mr. Beck on the drums gave them exactly what they needed...a whiteboy who could hit the skins like Tommy Lee as the engine for a Spanish speaking four piece.
So the session was unusual because of the control room set up we had. It was simply my friend Matt’s room and the band was to set up one house over (meaning we had a full house between ctrl and live rooms) so, with the neighbors permission we ran a 75ft. 9 channel snake across the top of their fence line down into the next yard into the bands garage where they had their live room. Our talkback system consisted of two walkie talkies for communications. I recorded the band with just a guide vocal that we didn’t commit to tape. The drums were recorded with one mic (SM58) in the kick going to track 1, and an SM81 over the top of the kit printed on track two. Bass cab had a 58 in front of the cab going to track 4 and the guitar had a 57 on the cab bound for track 3. The session went rather well for us having to run back and forth down the street if something needed fixing. I pretty much held up in Mr. Beck’s bedroom for the entire afternoon while they sweated it out in the hot garage. After we the afternoon of tracking the band came back to Mr. Beck’s where I promptly did bounce mixes down to my Sony CD deck and returned those stereo tracks back to 1 and 2 of a new cassette master. We waited until the following afternoon to track the vocals and mix because some of us...not gonna name anybody, were too drunk to be productive at that. There were no guitar overdubs so the next day we tracked lead and sparse backup vocals and got straight to mixing as soon as we printed the last BG VOX. I again mixed to my Sony CD deck and that was the project. A lo-fi ep in just a little under 48 hours.
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