Lip Service?

This past Tuesday, Big Light checked in at Bay Area Tone... a FULLY LOADED recording studio tucked into an apartment building in the inner Richmond. Fully. Loaded. Super sexy Orange heads and cabinets everywhere, Tone Kings, a bitchin' Ludwig Custom with an oystershell finish and 2 enormous floor toms, Neumann and Royer mics up the wazoo. Back into the control room there was even more to gawk at: rack after rack of compressors, processors and other goodies. So, you may be wondering - what were we doing here? Well, an opportunity floated across our desk (note to the reader: none of us really have a desk, perse, it's a proverbial desk) to go into a studio on Gap Jeans' dime, record two songs, and have some video shot of us performing these songs in-studio. So, we did several live takes of "Monster" and "Good Time of the Year," did some vocal overdubs on the selects, and then struck a bunch of the mic stands and extraneous gear from the performace area so that they could shoot video of us "playing." Putting on our bravest faces, we "played" along to the songs we had just finished recording, listening to the takes we liked best on in-ear monitors as 3 cameras rolled. Despite what anyone may tell you about lip-syncing... it's not as easy as it looks - at least it wasn't for us. It's like pretending to be yourself. And you gotta sell it, even tho on the inside you're not even buying it - you're feeling super foolish replicating glissandos on the guitar, singing with gusto into a mic that's not on, and faking your way through a drum solo that's played differently every time you do it. So, this whole production took probably twice as long as anyone expected it to take... and despite the fact that we were a bit punchy and beat by the end, we still tried to cajole the studio peeps (unsuccessfully) into letting us cut a demo of one of our new tracks before we split. The morale of the story? we're more comfortable DOING IT LIVE!