Crossingpoint Studio Diary
This is for our 2 song split release on Give and Take Records, featuring us and Reason to Live

Day 2 - 12 June, 2005
Guitar tracking by Brandon van Eeden
It was early Sunday morning in our Queensmead industrial area practice/recording space. The birds were chirping, but only because I hadn't fired up the Mesa Boogie yet. Yesterdays session with drums went very smoothly, so I was keen to get my parts down just as neatly.
Today was just me by myself operating both the console and guitar, but that's not a problem at all. While I was setting up I just played the drum tracks through the PA to make sure I was 100% familiar with the small changes we had made to the song structures yesterday.
To try and capture a fuller range of sound I decided to try using 2 mikes on the Legacy cab. One was the de facto standard SM57, the other the Samson Q kick drum mike. The idea behind using the kick drum mike was to capture some of the deeper fundamentals in my tone which the SM57 seems to miss.

The SM57 was placed directly on axis with a speaker cone, and the the Samson Qkick was placed just off the voice coil edge.
For guitar tracking its always a good idea to use a less overdrive and bass in your heavy bits. I've found this this helps capture a clearer and more punchy tone. I also played around a bit with recording at high and low volumes, checking the result each time, but finally settled on something in between... finding what I thought was a nice punchy area where the power tubes were working hard and the Vintage 30's were just starting to strain.
In case you don't know one of the basic 'secrets' to huge guitar sound, its too 'double' all your guitar parts and pan each left and right on mixdown (if you're a lone guitarist in a band).

I tackled The Light first as we've been playing this song for awhile. 10 minutes later the 'heavy' sections were done smartly. For the clean section the Korg A3 came into its own! A really nice acoustic sound went down on disk that I was really happy with, but also because I used the single coil setting on the Aria's neck pickup which gave it a nice jangly sound.

The Walk is a more complex structured song, with a lot of dynamic changes guitar wise, but with a really hard rocking driving feel throughout. Again I started with the heavy parts and mostly did the song in 'pieces' - doing the verses bit by bit, the chorus, and then the outro - its a pleasure to work this way, > being able to join parts of the best takes into one solid wall blistering tune.
For the clean intro I used the single coil setting of the BRIDGE pickup. You'll definitely hear the difference between this clean section and the one on the Light.
All in all I was done in around 2.5 hours. Best recording I've ever done in my life too! Cant wait to hear what Wesley and Ross do with these tracks. Check back in a weeks time and you'll hear what they have to say.

Gear used:
Guitar - Aria TS500 with Dimarzio Dual Sound pickup
PreAmp - Carvin Quad X
Poweramp - Mesaboogie Simul 2:Ninety
Effects - Korg A3
Switching - Nobels (Fender branded) MS-8
Speakers - Carvin Legacy 412T (Celestion Vintage 30's)
Strings - Dean Markeley Medium
Mikes - Shure SM57 and Samson Qkick

Day 1 - 11 June, 2005
Drum tracking by Juan de Lange
Well I've been super amped to lay down the tracks for Crossing Point's 2 new tracks and Saturday was the time to get down to business.
Both Brandon and I arrived at 9am @ the Bandroom/Studio to set up the drum kit as well as his equipment, It took awhile but doesn't everything with recording take time. We had a few cable problems but managed to get it all sorted out and managed to mic up the kit where it needed to be mic'ed.
As soon as everything was sorted we really sat down with the tracks to polish them up and to do a few changes to the structure of each drum part to each track.

Then we started tracking which is always fun and tiring but always worth doing.. We started with "The Light" and seriously if i recall we pretty much got that down in our first take, but after practicing it a few times that is. After we had finished we sat down and made sure we were very stoked with the recording and looked for any mistakes that I think I had made but couldn't seem to pick up on any. I think we were very happy with what was layed down..

We then moved onto our latest song "Walk". Now this song is a lot more complicated than "The Light" in my point of you; this has to be my favourite CP track. Its super fun, filled with so much power, and very melodic. This track we did about 3 times until we really got the best take of our our recording session. The take in my point of view was one of the best takes I have ever done in recording and I am very very stoked with it. ....with loads of upbeat tempo's to half tempo to sub dividing. This song is seriously rocking and will be rocking so hard when you get it into your cd players.

So to sum things up we pretty much ended up tracking both drum parts around 12.30pm which I think was very good as we had got both tracks down solid and tight as ever. So that was a wrap for Saturday, leaving it up to the rest of the members to contribute their own talents to the songs...

Production notes by Brandon:
We used the Samson 5-mike pack for the entire kit, except a Shure SM57 gave us better sound on the snare drum, so the Samson snare mike was moved to the underside of the snare drum. This worked out pretty well giving us an added dimension to play with on the mixdown. 2 overhead Shure SM58's were used to captured cymbals.

Recording gear used throughout:
Hardware: AMD Athlon64 3400+, 1GB RAM, ATA133 HD
Recording interface: 8 channel INCA88
Mixing Desk: Behringer UB1832FX
Mikes: Samson 5-kit, Rode NT1A, Shure SM57 & 58