Haiku Rd.: The road is long. And so is this entry.

Politics will return to these pages soon. But for now, a brief, self-indulgent aside.

So as far as our public image goes, Haiku Rd. has gone missing lately. Our next show isn't until May 6 (check in at our Web site for news and updates) and it's been a few weeks since our last one. Nothing else on the calendar. Why is that, you may ask? Have they broken up? Are they so busy they don't have time?

To you all I say nay!

Rather, we're at least hip deep in recording and sinking fast. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

I don't want to give a whole lot of secrets away, but a sizeable chunk of our best (and fan favorite) songs are already starting to take shape, like "Suddenly Silent," "One Leg at a Time (The Pants Song)" and "Take Me Out," as well as an instrumental I've wanted to record for a long time. Come to think of it, I already have, but it was more of a novelty experiment than an actual attempt.

We're working on this very, very carefully. We've already spent more in-studio time on this than we did on the first Hadrian's Wall album, and we're barely started. I'm not sure where Erik and Richard come down on the timeline, but my feeling is that we'll be working on principal recording through May or so. Re-recording, fixing and adding extra touches will probably last us through most of June, then a couple of weeks to a month for mixing, sequencing (putting the songs in the right order and doing cross-fades or figuring how much silence to put between songs) and mastering. I figure by mid to late summer we'll be done. Then we've got to send it off for duplication/manufacturing. And somewhere in there we have to do the title, cover and inserts. But with three creative minds, at least two of which have no small amount of graphic design experience, that should be no problem.

So a short treatise now on our recording equipment and methods, just because I feel like geeking out (and also documenting it).

As far as the equipment goes, we have the same instruments we use for performing (my two Oscar Schmidt acoustic guitars, Richard's Fender acoustic guitar and Erik's bass and electric guitars [whose manufacturers escape me]), plus a cheap-ass bodhran from Musician's Friend and my Alesis QS6.1 synth. Other instruments may make brief visits to the 'studio' as needs require. I don't want to spoil any surprises or scare anyone away, so I'll leave that vague.

The studio so far consists of two separate and distinct locations: My office (for recording keyboard parts, since inexplicably there is a loud and ineradicable electric hum whenever I plug the keyboard into Richard's equipment) and Richard's living room, for everything else.

The setup at Richard's place has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, the hardware and software are excellent (if a tad buggy sometimes) and space is ample. On the minus side, we have no way to isolate players, so anything recorded via microphone (which is just about everything) must be recorded singly. Also, because the computer is in the same room and the floors are industrial carpet over plywood, it's practically impossible to completely isolate the microphones from fan noise and other computer hums. We've managed to keep them down to a manageable level, but so far, they're still there.

We're recording through an Aardvark DirectPro Q10 into Richard's Windows XP machine running Cakewalk's Sonar 3 Producer Edition. There's a Shure SM-58 microphone present, as is a condenser microphone whose brand and specifications escape me. We've gotten good results double-micing the guitars, a procedure we've adopted so we can mix-and-match the different tones, or pan them slightly left and/or right for a nice stereo effect.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After a number of unsuccessful (and at times nearly fistfight-inducing) attempts at finding a procedure for recording that works for all three of us, we've hit on a way of working that seems to fit our character as a band. To start off, we establish a tempo for the song and MIDI up the keyboard to give us a metronome sound. We record this to one audio track while we have all of our instruments plugged into separate inputs on the Aardvark. Usually, we'll leave off the vocal mic, but sometimes it's helpful.

From there, we punch record and run straight through the song, mistakes and all. Usually, one take is enough unless there's a major boo-boo or if we all miss a cue or something.

We take this track as a foundation, then go through and rerecord every instrument and all the vocals. As the track takes on its own rhythmic feel, we mute the click track to try to get a more organic feel. But we have a lot of songs with stops and starts, so we need the click track in order to sync everyone up properly. Once the 'basic tracks' are done, we go through and remove the original 'scratch' tracks to save space and avoid confusion.

From there, we add other instruments (or at least we will; so far only one song has been augmented with keyboards, and even these are likely to be completely redone before long). Thus far, I've avoided sequencing any of the keyboard parts, because I tend to get very perfectionist with MIDI sequences, quantizing and fixing stray notes in the software; everything I've done has been live to 'tape'.

Then we'll mix, add effects, etc., in what I hope is a more or less collaborative process (it's Richard's equipment, Erik is in many senses a sonic wizard and there are certain parts of this recording that I can hear perfectly clearly in my head). I'm sure that as we do this, it will be evident that there are pieces here and there that need polish or slight redoing.

Et cetera, et cetera.

When the time comes for the remixes, I'll blather on about how I do that. That's a really fun process (I acquired the master tracks from Marillion's Anoraknophobia album and have been remixing them over the last year or so -- only two done so far, but if you're interested in hearing them, let me know and I'll make them available to you) that I love to talk about endlessly and bore people with.

When I have interesting news to share during this recording process, I'll talk about it more. I really think it'll be interesting to relate how put our instrumental together when we get there; it's going to be a combination of loops, audio editing and live playing. On the Hadrian's Wall album, "Home" was the track on which we really spread our wings in the studio and tried interesting things (which may or may not be apparent from listening to it). This instrumental, I think, will be the analog on this recording.

We're also planning on doing one written-in-the-studio song just to stir things up a bit. What I want out of this album (and I'm only speaking for myself here) is an album that people with a rock/pop aesthetic can listen to and think we've got some good tunes and a good rhythm, and only after some time realize that there's a lot of acoustic instrumentation and almost no percussion; and that folkies can listen to and grok the folk sensibility and get drawn in before being shocked by the subtle use of electrics, electronics and studio editing and production techniques. At this stage in the game, I want to be clever but not groundbreaking. That'll be the next album.

All right, enough. Back to the usual stuff.