In 2007, I was working with Ray Arreola at KLAQ in El Paso, and he had his new band, The Third Edge, alongside his longtime friend Sam, and his brother Edgar. They'd recorded an EP called "Horrible Songs at a Horrible Price", and it's really good. Check it out.
At the time we started talking about music was when he'd mentioned that they'd been recording up the road with a friend, and they really weren't done with things yet. He wanted to do more with it, and I think there was just scheduling issues with the friend recording their stuff. I've always tried to record and mix stuff, so I asked if he'd be interested in giving me a shot at the music.
He was.
He got me the multi-tracks of the 10 songs they'd been working on, and I started to work. I hadn't heard any of these songs, and what I heard sounded really cool, I heard what they wanted to do, and had some ideas.
First, I had to separate out the drums, which were stems, so I couldn't really do too much with them. I worked on cutting them up into separate parts and getting new drums sounds as best I could. To give them some weight. I remember the toms all being on one track, so I had to separate them to be able to pan them for space.
There were only single tracked guitars, so I worked with Ray to record more tracks, and I even got to add some of my own guitars to the songs.
There are some really fun songs to play on this album, with some wild riffs, like the main riff in "Made in Chile". Ray and I play very differently, so playing his riff the way I do gives them a little unique feel. Can't say if it's better or not, I'm too close to it...but I really like these songs. We played all of them through my years with the band, probably 200+ shows.
This was really my first full production (not counting the Sea Cheetahs), and there's a lot I would like to fix/change with what I did. They sound fine...I'm actually listening to the songs right now as I write this.
Better than I remember thinking they sounded.
Some things I really remember making my life hard working on these:
They never used a click track, so there was no ability to copy/paste anything.
They were full takes of the song for each instrument.
The playing is really good.
I didn't really edit the guitars well, to synch up the parts as best I could. I was a primitive editor, and probably still am.
I added some primitive harmonies to some of the songs. That's one thing I brought to the band's sound was vocal harmonies. Ray told me he'd wanted them, but they didn't really know how to do what they wanted.
Once we were happy with the music, we had no idea what to do with the artwork, and we were trying to set up CD printing and digital release...this was still in primitive times compared to now, too, so we ended up with a service that was ok, but probably not as good as what we could have ended up with.
So, I sat down with my crappy graphics skills to make some art for the album. There was some talk of three monoliths in a desert of something, so I tried to do that for the cover. You see the result at the top.
I wanted to make sort of a live collage from all the show photos we had built up already, and one photo from a show where we were all sweaty after our set. That became the main band photo for a while.
The collage came out ok, the CD art basic, and the album front and back are...what they are.
I'm really glad they gave me a shot at doing this, and it has led me down a path I really love, making songs, and producing songs for my friends, and getting them released.
I'm still working with the guys, producing songs Ray sends me...which we can talk about next time.
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