Putting it on a track

For Charleston band elsinore this was the first time the band had recorded in “an upscale studio.” The White Horse house band recently released their first album and recorded their track for a Green St. Records compilation album.

Each band represented on the album got eight hours in the studio. The morning for elsinore started before the band arrived (below) Saturday morning, Feb. 5. Second engineer Carl Lund and record producer Mark Rubel (Hum, Poster Children) directed the band to the spots each respective musician would occupy before they all began tuning.

Chris Eitel tuned his bass with the studio’s equipment (top right), Mark Woolwine warmed up on a piano the band members happily found to be in perfect tune (closest on right), and guitarist Ryan Groff warmed up both his vocal chords and his strumming (far right), while Dave Pride used only his ears to tighten the skins on his drums to the prescribed frequencies (bottom left).

The process occupied slightly more than an hour before the band launched into input testing. Rubel and Lund ran back and forth between the studio and the recording equipment, perfecting the input from each microphone as Groff and Pride gave their opinions on the levels of each instrument that would make their respective ways to the track, “less piano… more bass… less piano… more of Dave.” The group then played the song through for the first time, the first of what will be many times on the way to perfecting the track (bottom right).

The group likes and takes advantage of the Champaign-Urbana music scene, which has more than Charleston’s “two or three places to play.”

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