Today, I finished up my last bass line for the next Galactic Cowboy Orchestra album, Earth Lift. In fact, the track was the title track. For this record, I've been recording the bass through a Trace Elliot preamp I had lying around for a number of years, unused - boosting the gain to tape with a strip from the new Soundtracs console. The combination of those things is giving it a nice, natural overdrive and compression. I'm quite happy with the sounds I've been getting with this new rig.

The overall sound of this album is going to be less produces, with fewer overdubs than our previous work. This was a conscious effort on our part - to write songs that don't need extra parts to sound good recorded.

Recording some more violin tracks this evening as well. Miking Lisi's amp with a 441. Lisi is not a fan of headphones, as they tend to mess with her perception of pitch. So, we set her up in the control room and turn the speakers up to rehearsal volume. We can do that because she has an electric violin, so it's no different than recording electric guitar or bass or keyboards without headphones and monitoring through the speakers. Lisi's a very spontaneous live musician who is not fond of the studio, so we try to create an environment that is as much like a live band as possible. This way of recording her has worked incredibly well for the last two albums.