The Venetia Fair will be releasing their new full-length album The Venetia Fair…Basically Just Does Karaoke tomorrow! But before a release happens, there is the process of making it come to life. Check out what Mike Abiuso said about the entire process for recording their new album, and don’t forget t pick up a copy for yourself tomorrow!
Background:
Did you ever go to class, whether it be high school or college, get slammed with a huge assignment, get home (back to the dorms/apt) after the stressful day to relax and just the thought of the assignment literally makes you feel weak and exhausted allowing no option other than to procrastinate? When I looked at the list of kickstarter songs that we (The Venetia Fair) had to cover, I felt that exact way except for the fact that there were about a million other stressful things on my shoulders taking place at that particular time.
No worries, I’ll just reduce sleep from 5 hours a night to 3. No big deal, so lets party!
For those of you who don’t know me, allow me to introduce myself and shed light on the situation a bit further. Sorry, I was being rude. My name is Mike Abiuso. I play guitar in the band The Venetia Fair. We semi-recently held a kickstarter to fund our last full length “Every Sick, Disgusting Thought We’ve Got in Our Brain” which ended up extremely successful. In contradiction to the vibe of the first paragraph, I am beyond grateful and appreciative for all the support of our friends/fans/families. One of the offers on the table as a kickstarter reward was “pay x amount for us to cover a song of your choice”. As difficult as the choices were (Queen,’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, The B52s’ Rock Lobster, Green Day’s Jesus of Suburbia, The Blood Brothers’ Camouflage, Camouflage, and Coheed and Cambria’s The Willing Well LLL: Apollo II: The Telling Truth), we enjoyed the challenge, ate it for breakfast and spit it out in digital format with our own spin on it!
The first step was having all 5 of us sit down in the studio (SwitchBitch Studios / SwitchBitchRecords.com), listen to the tracks and lay down a basic outline of all the tunes. I personally have the easiest time laying down structures and melodies on piano first.
Being that some of the songs are just loaded with filler we had to strip the tracks to barebones. Forget the self-masturbatory guitar solos and nix the instrumental parts in the nine minute Green Day song. There were times where we were evening thinking of nixing parts that had lyrics but also thought “what if one of the kickstarter backers had a tattoo of one of the specific lyrics that we nixed in the song they chose?” There’s no cover up to that mistake.
After we gutted the songs, got all the structures and trimmed all the fat, we added our own TVF flare to it. Being that we had so many things to do as a band, this step took a very long time. All the pre-pro and demoing took months.
The final recording process was interesting. Tracking Chris on drums was the first step. As I would wrap up tracking a song, I would export the drums tracks and have Joe (keyboardist) edit them while I moved on to tracking the next song and so on and so forth. We had a mini assembly line going to save us some time.
Once all the drums were finished and edited I went through and did some fine tune editing making sure they were solid, perfect and sounded huge all the way through.
I tracked Mr. Chark on bass next, which went pretty smooth for the most part. Next was guitar. Being that I play guitar, I kind of had to track and produce myself as far as getting tones, deciding exact parts and detail work, figuring out what would be lead, what would be rhythm, what needed to be doubled and what needed to sound like what. After this step was finished, the guys came in and gave me their thoughts, which I then edited and altered accordingly until everyone was happy.
There were a lot of basic structural piano tracks that we had from the pre-production stage. Joe took some of those and made them his own with his infamous “valdis” aka arpeggio like patterns tastefully sprinkled about. We then got a tone that he was into and layered piano with organ for times that called for it.
Finally we took a trip down to Syracuse and recorded vocals with our favorite person in the whole world, Steve Sopchak at The Square Studio (TheSquareStudioOnline.com). A lot of the vocals we collaborated on as far as harmonies and ideas except for Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody because those vocals are a pretty iconic and a significant staple to that track and that band. For the most part we layered the vocals for that track verbatim with a few slight alterations according to the musical arrangement we chose.
After that we head back up to SwitchBitch Studios and wrapped up the vocal tracking along with some trumpets and little things that we decided needed adjusting.
That pretty much sums up the entire process. From there we went on tour while Steve did all the mixing and mastering. Let me tell you, that man has an amazing ear and a God damn heart of gold. He puts up with us 5 idiots so well and I can’t stress enough how much we appreciate everything he does.
Here we are now, a day from the release, our friends at Under the Gun Review streamed Dexys Midnight Runners yesterday, we have some treats lined up with Alternative Press and Absolute Punk for the release (12/24/13) and then we’re going to get the fuck outa here and spend a week with our families before we tour the west coast in January and die in a van flip through the Rocky Mountains!
Love you all,
-Mike Abiuso
