This week we covered Head Like a Hole, and honestly there was a lot of work going on in the background to pull it together. We put up cardboard cutouts all over the back wall. Some were ones we colored, some we drew on, just a mix of stuff that gave the room more character. That basically wraps up Volume 1 of Saturday Sessions. Every four songs we switch up the style a little or a lot, but the four songs in each block stay kind of similar to each other. That’s the whole idea for how we’re structuring it.
We added more black blankets to the walls to deal with the space and the sound, and we threw in a big light bulb and a bunch of fun props just to change up the look. The recording itself went smoothly, no major issues at first. It was the next day when I noticed the hiss. On release day I had already spent the whole week mixing it, and I needed that audio for performing too, so I was surprised I didn’t catch the hiss earlier. I tried to fix it by taking all the VSTs off and remixing it from scratch, but then it sounded horrible. So I had to undo all the work I spent hours on and go back to the original session.
Eventually I found the hiss and got it out, but after that the mix didn’t have much weight anymore. So I ended up doing bus mastering—basically four buses, and I mastered each one almost like stem mastering. That gave the track the life it needed without rebuilding the mix from zero again.
We added the newspaper logo on the wall for the Coyote Gazette. Rudy the leaf got in the way again like it always does. The footage itself went smoothly, though. We added a strobe light and some more lighting and stuff, so most of the lightning FX stayed. Emmy did some fun effects too. The whole thing was easy in the sense that I just went through the motions performing, but I mean that in a good way. I didn’t feel panicked this time. There were a couple times earlier in the year where I felt full-on panic attacks coming on during filming, but not this time. This time we tried each other’s ideas and it all went smooth. It was actually very fun.
I didn’t know the guitar parts again, same story as usual, so I only did a little guitar work. We ended up releasing it almost at 7 PM Eastern because of the delays from the hiss and the remixing. We missed the 6 PM target, so that’s something we’ll have to work on. But besides that, the session came out good in the end, and it wraps up the first four-song block of Saturday Sessions exactly the way we meant it to.