andrew dodson

The Worship.com blog recommends the new Enfield album.  So do I.

I’ve spent most of this evening listening through the recording sessions and doing rough mixes of all of the songs.  I still have a few to mix, but I’m really pleased so far.

From a personal standpoint, I’m pleased in a couple of ways.  Normally, I like to lay down scratch drums for everyone to record their tracks, then go in at the end and lay down my final drum tracks after everyone else has laid down parts.  I do this so that I can put fills in appropriate spots.  This time around, I’ve laid down my drums first.  We played the songs “live” while I recorded drums.  Since I consider myself a better live drummer than a studio drummer, this worked out pretty well.  I was able to get most of the songs in two or three takes, which helped speed things along.  I think it’s some of my better studio work.

The drums also sound really good.  I am biased, but I think a good drum sound makes or breaks a recording.  The lodge had great acoustics and you can tell on the drum tracks.  I made some good choices on drum mics, and made sure my drums were tuned well (I am sometimes lazy about tuning my drums). 

We still have a lot of work to finish the album (more songs to record, vocals, extra stuff), but I’m excited for the chance to share these songs with people.  Hopefully that will be sooner than later. 

I did a “live blog” for the JMB recording sessions over the weekend.  This was posted on the JMB website… pictures & videos coming soon:

Tomorrow, the Josh Martin Band begins the process of recording our next studio album.  On the eve of the recording weekend, I had a couple of thoughts.

Two years ago at this time, I was on my way to Minnesota for the Desiring God National Conference.  Head over to my photos section to see pictures from the trip.  It was my first conference and was a blast.  Aside from hearing some great speakers in person, there were a lot of little things that made the trip fun.  The bed at the hotel was insanely comfortable.  The Michigan Wolverines’ football team and the Chicago White Sox stayed in the hotel – I rode the elevator with Jermaine Dye and saw Paul Konerko in the lobby.  It was a great trip.

A little over two and half years ago, as the Josh Martin Band recorded our previous studio effort, The Point Community Church started.  I remember driving from Cedarmore on Sunday morning – after a full weekend of recording – to a skating rink to set up my equipment for our first service.  Since then, The Point has grown to 300+ members and 200-250 weekly attendance.  Sometimes, people ask me why I still live in Frankfort.  The Point is one of the reasons why.  I really love my church.

So, here we go.  Recording again.  The great part about this album is that we have no idea what will end up on the album.  We begin the process with only a handful of songs written.  Over the course of the fall, we’ll finish writing some more songs to finish out the album, but those songs remain a mystery.  Stay tuned for more updates from the studio.

This has been a good weekend. Saturday, the Josh Martin Band was back on stage in Cynthiana. We played an outreach concert with LaFollette and had a great time. We’ve been trying to play with them for about two years, and it finally worked out. I’m hoping we play with them again soon. The bands closed out the night by joining forces to play Jeremy Camp’s “Walk By Faith.” It was a cool experience to have full bands on stage playing.

Today, I got a break from playing drums at The Point. Other than recording, it was pretty relaxing to be able to enjoy worship with the congregation. John Martin did a great job filling in. There is a LOT going on at The Point right now, so it’s pretty exciting. We’re planning all sorts of things for the fall that will begin in the next couple of weeks.

I’m in the process of overhauling The Point’s media site audio library. I found an awesome Wordpress plugin this weekend that gives us a ton of flexibility in filtering our audio by speaker, series, tags and more. It’s going to take me a while to get all the information transferred over to the new library, but it will be very good. I’m hoping to lauch it sometime in the next couple of weeks.

BADmedia is fairly busy right now. I’ve started another partnership with a local business that needs some web help. There’s plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of weeks. Hopefully, I can keep lining up work!

The Josh Martin Band was back in action this past weekend – finally. For the past year, it seems like we played a gig, took three months off, played a gig and repeated the process. For the next several weeks, it’ll feel like we’re a “real” band again with several gigs coming up.

We played at Cedarmore this past weekend (our home-away-from-home) for Memorial Baptist’s men’s retreat. The weekend started for us with a rehearsal on Thursday night. Since we led worship for the retreat, we stayed away from our originals and played some new (to us) worship songs. A modern version of “Come Ye Sinners” seems to be a new favorite for the band. We also played “My Hope Is You” (Third Day), “By His Wounds” and “Days of Elijah” for the first time. It amazes me that we can spend twenty minutes learning a song and play it an hour later (in this case, “Days of Elijah”). We also broke out “Open the Eyes of My Heart” for the first time in about two years – with no rehearsal. Sometimes, we like to fly by the seat of our pants.

Josh broke out his electric guitar for the weekend. Since Bert left the band, some of our songs need a little more body to them, so Josh has decided to play his electric on a few songs. I thought it sounded great on “My Hope Is You.”

The only other real news from the weekend is that we will begin recording our next album this fall! I wasn’t expecting us to start recording so soon, but it’s coming together pretty quickly. Bert is gracious enough to let us use the facilities at Cedarmore for recording, but we have to use them before they shut them down for the winter. This means we have to get rolling, and that’s just fine by me. As of right now, this is how the album breaks down:

• Christ Is Our Life
• Clumsy Believer
• Exposed
• Good Enough
• Come Thou Fount (maybe)
• Come Ye Sinners (maybe)

We’ve worked on at least three other new songs that still need some work (and titles that I forget right now). One song in particular has come together very quickly over the last couple of weeks, and we still have more material in the works. Looks like we’ll be shooting for a release date sometime early next year!

Some time ago, I posted that I wanted to make loops for every song done by The Point’s band. Wisdom soon set in and I realized this was silly. Not every song needs a loop in the background. And, occasionally, my loops get shot down (wink, wink John Bennett!). But, I’ve still enjoyed programming simple click tracks to every song. Since a few of the band members are on in-ear monitors, this helps tremendously with tempos. Plus, I’ve never had a big enough drummer ego to assume I’m always spot on with tempos. How’s that for modesty? If help’s available, I’m not going to turn it down.

For a while now, I’ve been using iDrum to program my click tracks. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a simple eighth-note shaker/hi-hat sound. I’ll occasionally get adventurous and program a more complex loop. The advantage to using iDrum is that I can switch between click tracks from song-to-song pretty quickly during our worship set. But, there is a drawback.

On the few songs where we actually run a loop through the house, it means I have to use a different program to control the loop. I usually create my house loops with a combination of Tracktion and iDrum. It gets even more complicated when I need to fade out the loop or stop the loop at the end of the song. Since I have sticks in my hands, it leaves me wishing God would’ve given me a third arm in these situations.

To get around this, I started using Ableton Live (the “Lite” edition) this past week. It’s very well-known for being a great, live, on-the-spot music tool – hence the name. I was able to program click tracks and loops together in a set, including fade outs on the loops. It worked like a dream. Switching click tracks and/or loops from song-to-song is even quicker in Live than in iDrum. I programmed the set to switch to the next click track/loop with the press of a button on my keyboard and we were off to the next song.

There is a learning curve to Live. I’m normally pretty good at figuring out programs quickly, but I’ll admit that I had no clue how to operate Live. My buddy Jeremy helped me a bit and I’ve figured some more out on my own, but it’s taken a good month or two to get to this point. But, if you’re looking for an efficient way to manage programmed parts of your music in a live setting, I highly recommend it.

How ’bout the new look of the blog? Wordpress.org has revamped their theme directory and I found this one yesterday. I really like the simplicity of it.

So, what have I been up to? I’ve kept up with learning Flash and that’s coming along fairly well. I’m thinking about implementing some Flash on the Josh Martin Band website, but I’m not sure. I’d like to put what I’ve learned into practice in one way or another.

I’ve mainly spent time redesigning a few sites as of late. I continue to get people calling or emailing with interest in having a website done, so that’s been encouraging for BADmedia. I’m hoping to nail down a few more sites by the end of this week.

The Josh Martin Band stepped back on stage this past weekend at the Frankfort Christian Academy. It was good to play again. We’re going to start rehearsing again soon for some upcoming gigs. Josh has written some new material, so we will work on that as well.

Q: At what point can it be determined that a person’s music collection is too large?

A: When considering buying an album at the iTunes Music Store, you search your music library to discover you already own the album. In addition, the album’s play count in iTunes sits at zero. Meaning, at some point you spent $10 on something you’ve never used.

I stumbled across Caleb Rowden on eMusic a couple of days ago. He’s a Christian artist from Missouri. I’m really enjoying his debut album right now. The closest comparison I could give is a mix between Jeremy Camp and maybe a Kutless or Story Side B. It’s definitely more of a rock-style of worship music. Check him out.