Full Time Smile Stories (The Studio)

Unpublished blurbs from 2021

The Studio

We decided to move all our recording equipment to the Teegardin’s in Roswell, GA. They had a guest house large enough to fit our equipment and sleep all of us. It was the perfect place to live for a week and make music - no distractions that come naturally with working where you live. No one went home for lunch or to sleep; we all ate, slept, and worked together. It was magical!

We put the console on the kitchen island and the tape machine in front of the oven, treating the big living room as the live room and the bedroom, bathroom, and closet as iso booths. We made a little amp-corner out of baffles so we could still have them in the room with us. When everything is totally isolated it gives the album a different sonic quality. We wanted to have conversation going on between recorded parts to breathe some life into the whole. There were a couple songs that we had to send Noah to the closet for, though.

We brought everything and its backup with us. We knew if there was a storm and the power supply for the console blew, or one of the record cards in the tape machine went bad, we were screwed. There was stuff all over the place.

Recording

Engineering our own records is fun for us, although sometimes it feels like it might be nice to have someone else steering that ship. There’s a lot going on and a lot of room for error when making a record, but we try our best to trust each other because we know ultimately we want what’s best for the songs. For Full Time Smile, We tried tracking with lots of effects so it was as exciting coming off the tape as it was in our headphones. If the captured performance reflects our energy and saves us work at mix-down, we’re happy campers!

The Tascam M600 we owned at the time. “Fluff=Nothing” and “Leaves” were mixed on this console.

Mixing

The mixing process for Full Time Smile was a bit more arduous than the tracking. We divided the work amongst ourselves - George, Bryce, and Johnny taking 3-4 songs each, getting them most of the way there and finishing them by committee. We moved our workflow to ProTools, dumping the 16 track tapes to the computer; Utilizing our now-infinite track count, we made up for things we couldn’t bring with us to Georgia: Christian Gonzales, a friend of ours who worked at Club Roar in Nashville at the time, let us into the studio and engineered the baby grand piano on “Horses.” We felt “Whatstheuseinwaiting” needed another section, and Noah had written some additional words with a new melody, so Bryce engineered some filter magic to create the middle section. We then added the drum freakout in the end, along with the spoken words of astronauts reluctant to get back into their spacecraft out of sheer enjoyment for moon-walking.

In these ways, the songs benefitted from using digital recording tools, but the process was prolonged with access to so many options for shaping the music. We learned what we liked and didn’t like about doing it this way, and it informed our process for the future.

In the end, Full Time Smile reflects the vision and tastes of five individuals giving their best for 11 songs and for their band, and we’re so glad to have been able to make it. Thanks for listening!