My gigging schedule has slowed down as the Fall approaches, and this combined with the semester at Berklee now up and running, has left me with some much needed free time to work on my own projects.  To this end, I’ve built up quite a head of steam on my Dragonfly Taxi recording project.  Considering the home project nature of the project, I’ve finally dialed in some damn good drum sounds, with some key advice given by a couple of my colleagues who really know their shit about recording. Thanks to Mike Carrera (always!!), Carl Beatty and Stephen Webber. One thing I’m learning (or re-learning perhaps):  if your instrument doesn’t sound good, no matter what you do to beef up the sound with mics, pre-amps, mic placement, won’t make much difference.  I really want a deadly CRACKING snare drum sound and the two snare drums I had weren’t doing me justice, so I happened upon a used Pearl free floating 14′ piccolo snare at a local music store.  Now I got the SOUND! Before when I was laying down tracks, I felt the need to immediately start messing around with EQ, gating, limiting, compressing just to get a 1/2 decent sound, but now I don’t have to do much at all to get a full sound on play back.  I would say this is ultimately the true test revealing if you got it right. Now, when I got to mix, I know I really have something to work with.

Recently Jeff Cressman (awesome sound engineer and great trombonist [been with Santana for a number of years now] was staying at my house along with the amazing body percussionist, Keith Terry.  They were in town from the SF area to do a couple of gigs in Boston. (I met these great musicians at Jazz Camp West last summer.) I was able to get a couple of hours free with Jeff and set up my portable studio in my living room and got him to play a GREAT solo on my tune, Dub Jumper.  Check out this excerpt:

Go to the Dragonfly Taxi recording project page to hear a couple more excerpts.

I also found the time to lay down Fender Rhodes and Hammond organ tracks (yup, the REAL THING baby!), borrowing a friends Rhodes and finding a quiet couple of hours Sunday morning to record the organ at Berklee.

Next, it’s time to finish ALL the drum tracks and keyboard tracks, then choose the right guitar players to lay down lead and riddim tracks. And after that, to get the horns done (flute, trumpet, tenor, bone) and then the back up vocals.  I’ll complete all the lead vocals at various points along the way.