"Neeur, neeur, neeur."
Neal Schmitt vocalizes a guitar part, nodding and neeur-ing along to the music that plays through the mixing board in the back room of Workbook Studio.
In the next room, Stepford Five vocalist/guitarist Keith Jenkins is trying out his last couple of ideas-a pick scrape, a sonic burst resulting from guitarist Jason Dziak turning Jenkins' tuning keys while he plays, and a little bluesy guitar part which the other members of his band and producer/engineer Schmitt decide is just a little too bluesy.
And that's that. The Stepford Five has recorded everything they need to produce their upcoming second album, The Stepford Five and the Art of Self Defense.
But it's not time to break out the champagne just yet. Though recording is by far the longest, hardest part of the process for the band, it's still only a part of the process.
The 10 songs and one short noise burst that will eventually make up the album still need to be mixed and mastered, and then packaged for distribution before they'll be spinning in anyone's CD player. With the tracks all recorded, the next step is mixing, one of the easier parts of the recording process-for the band at least. "It's basically sitting and listening to a track over and over," bassist Tim Minneci said, "slowly figuring out what levels everything's going to be at."
The band left a lot of that figuring out up to Schmitt for their debut album Mesh. Schmitt definitely has the least biased ear, the band members agree, since he won't be mixing anything he himself played. "Whatever your instrument is, you're going to be like, 'Let's turn that up a little,'" Minneci explained.
"You don't want to have too many people in the kitchen," drummer Mark Kovitya said of mixing. The mixing process isn't a totally hands-off thing for The Stepford Five, however. For 2000's Mesh, Dziak took a week off work to sit in on the mixing, and for The Art of Self Defense, the band and Schmitt have been mixing tracks (and in some instances, remixing them) since last March.
As for mastering, the band was even less involved with that process for Mesh. At Schmitt's suggestion, they took the album to John Schwab Recording, a popular studio for local bands to have their mastering done. "We petty much just dropped it off [at John Schwab] and said 'We're a rock and roll band, here's our CD, make it sound like a rock album,'" Minneci said.
Just because an album's self-published doesn't mean it has to look like a demo or a pirated and burned batch of Napster tunes. While some of their favorite bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Jeff Buckley and Afghan Whigs have had the art departments of major labels sweating this stuff, The Stepford Five have only themselves.
Luckily, Dziak's day job as a designer comes in pretty handy when putting together their liner notes and packaging. For Mesh, he used some art he had lying around, coming up with a blue pair of lips on a gray field for the cover and a blurry woman in a swimsuit model pose for the back. The inside was fairly standard stuff-track listings, a band photo, credits and thank yous-along with a special thanks section listing the band's legion of influences. With that done, the band sent the layout and mastered album off to the cheapest place they could find to print and press the disc. The design for the new album, like everything else, will be more elaborate.
The band noticed a common theme of defending yourself on various levels in this new batch of songs (though the new album is not-repeat, not-a concept album), and thus decided to tie them all together with the title and packaging. The art for The Art of Self Defense will be something of a family affair for Minneci. His mother Coni will draw up some self-preservation diagrams (like what to do in the event of a plane crash, how to put yourself out if you catch on fire), based on pamphlets provided by his fireman father James (this isn't Coni's first design work for her son's band; she also designed a flyer featuring caricatures of the quartet).
After Jenkins' last little guitar experiment, the too-bluesy blues guitar burst, Schmitt turned halfway around in his wheeled chair and asked The Stepford Five if they were ready to break out the champagne.
But they're keeping a cork in the bottle for now, and Schmitt swiveled back to the board to begin mixing. Even once they get their 500 CDs, jewel cases and liners mailed back to them, they still have to get The Art of Self Defense to their potential listeners. Because until then, all of this work has been a tree falling in the woods (and any celebrating would be just a cork popping in the woods).
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