My own group Le Petit Protest was originally scheduled to play a show this evening at the Mercury Lounge in Goleta, CA. Unfortunately, we had some bass player problems (who doesn’t?!?) and we were forced to pull out. Anyways, because I thought  we’d be performing in the evening, I set up a 9am start time for this session!

Mornings have never been my friend.

I got in @ about 8:45am to get drums set up.

Decided to create a mismatched set using my favorite pieces from different sets.

I used the Tama Rockstar  Kick, Ludwig Brass Snare, & late 70’s Ludwig – Toms. Dom used his own cymbals.

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I couldn’t find ANY of my drum keys!!!!!!

I have 3 of my own and 1 that stays with the kick drum pedal. I was mega pissed.

The 1st Line guys came in right on time. Dom had his own drum key and I was able to get back on track.

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I was introduced to the new Bass player, Justin Abernathy, who appears to be a super cool dude. He brought along a great bass guitar (Sting Ray) and Bass head( a Mesa Boogie thing that was built like a tank). He’s also got an amazing old Ampeg Head.

We ran a line out of the head and dialed in a bass sound. The head was really bright but had many useful tone shaping options. I love old gear like this piece. Simple, effective and really cool looking. We ran his head into my Ampeg cab but kept the volume pretty low since they were tracking live this time.

Their guitar player Kevin brought along  a new PRS that sounded very nice through his Line 6 Vetta amp with a line out direct to Pro Tools.

This particular amp totally changed my opinion of Line 6 gear and digital amps in general. Very cool piece of gear.  Unfortunately, it was having some glitch with the mids knob. The mids level would jump all over the place on its own. We finally got it to stick in one spot.

We ran Danny’s guitar through his solid state Fender M-80 head and into my Sovtek cab, and mic’d it with an SM57.

The band did not need scratch vocals so we used the extra channel to put a mic (57) on the shell of a snare drum to capture these rim hits Dom was doing on a couple of songs.

They were well rehearsed and I was very happy with all the sounds we got. The band has really stepped up and sound more like a unit this time around.

We tracked four songs and have plans to do four more with intention of releasing a new T1st album soon.

These guys are the definition of “work ethic” and their songs keep getting better!

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Dom came in on the 9th to clean up drums and set up a drum template for the songs. We manually gated the toms (to avoid false triggers). Cleaned up starts and endings and fought over EQ settings.

Follow the link to see and hear more from The First Line:

http://www.myspace.com/the1stline