Another long night last night, although this one did wrap up at 3 am (verses the near 6 am last time!)

Manabu had taken the track home and mixed it a bit and did some arrangement that I thought worked really well. Yasu and Hideki came, and we got down all the wood bass parts.

It’s a bit fast (180 bpm, which is not crazy fast by any means, but it’s not a lullabye, either), so once you get into the 16th notes, it starts edging over into difficulty. Hideki was slapping the shit out of that bass at a couple of points, which was crazy wild to watch. I did get to play one little part on it, myself, my first time ever: during a slower part, I just laid the thing down and played it with a pick. Huge, and I almost felt like Peter Steele or something there.

I think we got some good stuff down, but I can appreciate how difficult arranging becomes with more instruments. Usually, I approach a song like this: guitar part, drums, vocals, and then bass. Then add some “dood-a-lee-doos” with a second guitar, but mostly just double the “main” guitar. However, when you’ve got 2 drummers, 2 bass players, and 2 guitarists, it’s a nice challenge to stretch that out a bit and try to have 6 different things going on that form a coherent whole. Yeah, there’s still quite a bit of “uni” (basically doubling another instrument’s part), but there are some times where there are 6 unique parts, and I think those worked out pretty nice.

If things go according to plan (assuming I understood the plan), we will finish tracking instruments tommorrow, and a rough mix will go to Yasu for him to work on vocals. I’m not clear if we will try to do any mixing until after the actual vocals are tracked or not. We’re on a fairly tight deadline for this particular song, so we’ll have to see.