The Lassie Foundation vs the Doc

While the Doc is get­ting cabin fever in the Rockies, the Lassie’s have been rehears­ing for a show in Los Angeles on April 23.  For the bet­ter, The Lassies have left behind their “inter­na­tional hits” for a new sonic par­a­digm (how pren­tious does that sound?).  In a nut shell, cool shit is hap­pen­ing with the Foundation.

projekt:band, entry 1

So for the past three weeks, I’ve been work­ing for a major label act, in var­i­ous capac­i­ties.  I do a lit­tle of every­thing that I do, but my main objec­tive is what it always is:  play rock band.Not the video game, but the real thing.  If music is a reli­gion, then the truly func­tional rock band is what I con­sider to be the high­est form.  Most of the time, that func­tion­ing has a giant ‘dys’ on the front of it, but that doesn’t scare me off.  Like all reli­gions, regard­less of the indi­vid­ual rea­sons for ‘buy­ing in’, the group as a whole can accom­plish some great things inspite of them­selves.  I know this from expe­ri­ence.  And I get a great deal of energy from the pur­suit of that greater good.Rock bands are like any orga­ni­za­tion.  Individuals need to dis­cover and own their ulti­mate use­ful­ness to the orga­ni­za­tion, a healthy dose of per­spec­tive needs to be taken on a daily basis, trust must be built, lazy duffs must be got­ten off of, vision estab­lished and fol­lowed, sys­tems devel­oped, etc. etc.  And this project has been no dif­fer­ent.  Aside from the writ­ing and record­ing of music, all of these things have been tak­ing place as well, with good results.One of the main tasks at hand for the first cou­ple weeks, how­ever,  was putting together a fully-​​functioning tem­po­rary stu­dio inside of a house.  The band has acquired quite a bit of nice gear, guided and assisted by a con­sult­ing engi­neer, and this is its maiden voy­age as a put-​​together sys­tem.   The list of awe­some­ness is over­whelm­ing.  There’s a Pro Tools HD3 sys­tem run­ning inside of a loaded Apple Mac tower, which I stare at through an Apple 30″ cin­ema mon­i­tor.  There are 2 Digidesign inter­faces being clocked by none other than the out­ra­geous Antelope Isochrone and the 10M.  I lis­ten to Dynaudio BM15A’s, and NS-10’s with a black Bryston 3B, which are sit­ting on Primacoustic Recoils, and con­trolled by a Crane Song Avocet.  In the racks we have cus­tom mounted Neve 1272’s, API 312A’s from Brent Averill, a Universal Audio 2–610, Avalon 737, JFL Audio MP F4, some Neve 33314’s, an Alan Smart C1, Empirical Labs Distressors, Universal Audio 1176’s (very, very old ones), API 550 EQs, a Crane Song IBIS, and a Chandler Limited Curve Bender and Zener Limiter.Microphones include an AKG D112, Shure SM57’s, some old AKG 414’s, old Electrovoice RE-20’s, a Royer Labs 121 and an SF-​​24, a cou­ple of Cascade Fathead II’s, a Neumann U47 FET, AKG C24, Neuman U67, and prob­a­bly a cou­ple of oth­ers here and there.  We’re using Sennheiser HD280’s through the very cool Furman HRM-​​16 and HDS-​​16 head­phone sys­tem.  The racks are all shock-​​mounted, and the whole stu­dio is pow­ered by a Ground One setup​.Ridiculous​.So, right now, the band is just writ­ing songs, com­ing up with ideas, jam­ming, etc.  It appears that there will be a glut of mate­r­ial that every­one loves, so the hard part will be nar­row­ing it down.  Each guy spends some time alone with me dur­ing the day, and then at the end of the day every­one gets together and scopes out each other’s stuff.  This has lead to some great moments of inspi­ra­tion, with every­body feed­ing of each oth­ers’ ideas.  One guy lays down an idea, comes back the next day and finds out that another guy thought it was awe­some and added some­thing even fresher on top of it.  The only prob­lem with this is that I’m the only one always on duty.  Long days and nights for the doc, man.Next time I’ll write about some of the musi­cal instru­ment gear sit­tin’ around here.  A blog in itself.