World Racketeering Squad's first studio recording: Panic!

Every Monday we play an open mic at Conan's Pizza, where the host, Billy, is really friendly and always does a great job on our sound, especially for what is basically a funky little PA system set up in a pizza shop!  He makes it sound terrific.

Anyway, last week he asked us if we'd be interested in recording a song at a studio and of course we jumped up and down a lot and said sure!  We recorded our fast punky song "Panic" with some friends on drums and bass and it went really well, very quick and tight recording session and very easy.  They suggested it might sound nice with acoustic guitar, but I really didn't want it to have acoustic on it.  I relented and gave it a shot, came up with a little lick and pattern that was decent.  We recorded a couple of takes but I still wasn't feeling it on acoustic, so I played it again on electric, a more distorted lead part.  The whole thing was an excellent experience.

Tonight we went by a party with some folks who work at the pizza shop.  I didn't even know Billy was there, but suddenly Reed gets my attention and I listen to what's playing over the speakers at the party.  It's our song!  Billy had mixed and mastered Panic and people were bopping to it and getting down.  A bunch of people complimented us on it and Billy played it twice!

Listening to the track, Billy had done a lot of creative mixing to our very simple punk song.  The electric guitar is cut out in the second verse, and he used some of my acoustic lead work that I hadn't expected to hear again.  He said he mixed the acoustic and electric lead licks in the rest of the song as well, because they matched up. 

He fixed a notable error late in the song--there's a driving verse, then suddenly a sharp hit, and everything cuts out for a couple of beats before it all comes back in again.  The drummer had kinda flubbed the lead-in to that part, and we hadn't re-recorded it to get it right.  Billy took that part and cut everything out for two successive hits, which sounds even better than one!  He just did a lot of stuff that wouldn't have occurred to us, but which sounds great.

The final version of the song "Panic" is up on our myspace:
http://www.myspace.com/worldracketeeringsquad

And on our Virb page:
http://www.virb.com/worldracketeeringsquad

Now I'm working on the sounds with my new Vox AD30VT amplifier, which sounds WAY better than my Zoom G2.1u effects unit, in fact I think I am going to put the Zoom to the side for a while and play with just the Vox.  I just want to get used to its versatility and its sounds are beautiful.  And we're playing our regular open mics on Monday and Tuesday before the big gig on Wednesday. 

Oh, and I finally started teaching guitar lessons!  Had my first lesson today and have two scheduled for next week.  Things are just going great all around.

Jeff