Basically My Friend Jerome started with the idea of writing a song about a clone who kills himself because everyone is picking on him for being a clone. I have a theory that power, the ability to affect our environment, is how we prove to ourselves that we are alive. We can create a piece of software, we can win the big game, or we can kill someone. The same goes for other animals too, including bugs and Martians.

I almost always write the lyrics first which is different from most songwriters I know. I believe in the idea that a decent song should be able to be played with an acoustic guitar and vocal and still sound good. In the case of My Friend Jerome I sat with an acoustic guitar and played around with chords and melodies and tried to fit the words in. In order to do this the words got changed quite a bit. Originally I had a whole different chorus but I found it only served to complicate the song.

After I had a song structure and outline together I set up a PZM room mic and recorded myself singing and playing the song into Pro Tools. The next step was to record a "fancy" click track so I could hire one of my drummer friends to come in and lay down some drums. Choosing the proper tempo before you get started is very important. Actually, in a way there is nothing more important!

After the tempo was decided on I laid down the basic chords on electric guitar and a scratch vocal and mixed those in with a click, everything panned to center. When performing live, sequences are generally panned to one ear and the click to the other so that the music channel can be routed to the front end without the click and the click can be routed to the drummer so he can sync the band to the sequence. The click in a studio situation where there is no band performing live is different. I put the music and the click together and panned everything to center. Sometimes I record bass in the fancy click but most times I don't. I would rather play bass to the drummer than have the drummer play drums to the bass. I have no problem with the drummer playing to the vocal. I like to do 4 hour drum sessions and try to accomplish 3 songs and get 3 or 4 takes of each song. On this day we recorded drums for the songs Freak Magnet and Amazing as well as for My Friend Jerome.

In the case of My Friend Jerome I emailed a drummer friend of mine, Sean Reynolds, the click tracks a couple days ahead of the session date and he came in and played each song 3 or 4 times. We did one or two takes of basic grooves and one or two takes with many fills and spontaneity. I could always edit takes together later. For the session I brought my Pro Tools rig to an old church that my friend David Jones turned into a recording studio and we recorded drums in the big room, a beautiful sounding chapel in West Vancouver that has since been demolished. Unfortunately when I got the tracks home the ride cymbal track wasn't there. It turns out we had a bum mic and didn't notice it at the time so I flew in some ride samples from a Mick Fleetwood drum loops collection. When mixing drums I always use Drumagog, or as some call it Drumagod!

There are probably 16 tracks of guitars in My Friend Jerome. I generally mix amp sounds with plug-in sounds. I'll run the guitar through a DI and then run one line to the amp and the other direct to Pro Tools. This way I can use my natural sound I use when performing live plus a DI line for...whatever. My favorite guitar plug-in is IK Multimedia's Amplitube which to me is the most natural sounding of the many plugs on the market. For more effected or strange sounds though I prefer Native Instrument's Guitar Rig. I also really like McDSP Chrome Amp. These are all very high quality guitar plug-ins.

I don't worry too much about coming up with perfect sounds at the tracking stage although I probably should. It's just more fun for me to play around with stuff in the box. I also don't worry too much about performing things perfectly. I'd rather do 3 or 4 takes back to back and then edit stuff around and try different things. Although I accept the fact that audio is very hard work I try to change the process whenever it becomes boring to me.

My vocal chain is a Bluebird microphone through a Focusrite Vocalmaster Pro preamp into Pro Tools. I'll sing the song 4 times from beginning to end into Pro Tools all on the same track but on different playlists. Playlists are something fairly unique to Pro Tools and is probably the number one reason I have chosen PT to be my main platform. Then I'll edit together one good vocal track compiled from those takes. If I don't get a good enough vocal from that I'll do the same thing again but to a different track. That usually gives me enough material for a lead vocal and a double. If I use a double I almost always run it through a distortion pedal or something and set it back in the mix with a bit of the long reverb. All my sessions usually run 2 reverbs, a short verb about 500ms and a long verb about 1.5 seconds. Ideally I'd like to use 3 reverbs but it just bogs down the CPU too much. In reality though 2 is fine because ambient information tends to be one of the first things that gets sacrificed when you hit the filterbank of the MP3 encoder. I prefer the Fraunhaufer MP3 encoder. I use Adobe Audition to encode but there is a whole trick to making a good quality MP3. If you have loud mastered material it is not advisable to do a straight conversion. Inter-sample peaks and other weird distortions will occur.

If there is a guitar solo I always record it last. My Friend Jerome doesn't really have a solo but there is a lead in behind a section of the bridge. I do solos similar to the way I do vocals only instead of doing 4 takes I'll do 10 - 20 improvised takes and edit them together until it feels right. A lot of what I do is just playing around with editing and plug-ins. It's like problem solving for your psyche. If something doesn't feel right then do something until it does. In the old days I would compose solos but now I enjoy the discovery of editing improvised takes together.

At some point the song starts sounding like a song and then it's a matter of listening. I admit I way over-indulge in listening. That's the most pleasure I have as a human. I'll listen 100 times in a row without touching a knob just thinking about the possibilities of the song and the production. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of listening at very loud volumes. It's just my way of becoming emotionally involved with the music. It will almost surely mean an early retirement though. At some point in the mix I'll get my friend Robert Graves in to tweak things for a couple hours. As far as I'm concerned Rob is the best live sound mixer in Vancouver and his perspective on a mix is invaluable to me. Beyond that I tend to be an obsessive tweak monkey, especially when it comes to vocals.

I generally don't do my own mastering because I don't have an ideal listening environment or any fancy compressors like the Manley Vari-mu or a Crane Song. These units are still far superior to any of the software compressor/limiters in the plug-in world. This is mostly due to CPU restrictions. I usually get 2 or 3 versions of a master and often edit them together. I find that mastering compression acts on different parts of a song in different ways. The guy I use for mastering is Jeff Gudenrath at www.audiointegrity.com in Austin,Texas. I like him because he is a musician and he respects the mix. He doesn't try to force a square peg into a round hole. When I was looking for a mastering engineer I sent out samples to about 30 guys and had them master the samples so I could choose who to go with. Honestly, he was the only guy that actually sent stuff back to me that sounded better than the original without changing the nature of the mix. Beware of bad mastering especially in these days of the loudness war. It's not how loud you make it but how you make it loud. Anyway, that's how I generally record a song but that's just me. In the end it is most important to develop a process that you enjoy participating in.

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