Well, I finally got out of the studio in early April. I officially did the last step (last vocal track) and sat back to realise that it was over...done. The one thing I'd worked for for 5 straight years of hits and misses and I had already finished the fleeting moment. I felt empty, sometimes even alone. I hadn't a clue what to expect going into the room full of mics and cords, and I definitely was lost when I left.

I thoroughly expecting the experience to enlighten me, open up a part of me I'd never seen before. I felt I'd have found myself by the end of it all. What happened, in truth, was the opposite. When I expected to be the happiest man alive, I ended up being the guy who didn't know what road to take next.

Studio work really is in a world of its own. The endless hours of playing the same bars of music over...and over...and over again really wears on you. Even more stressful is the pressure to get the exact sound you want to get out of whatever you're playing. Believe it or not, it's hard when you're an independent band that is self funding an album to run against the multitude of mainstream musicians with endless pockets of useless money. You know, the money that their producers toss to them to keep them the robotic minions they are.

We entered the studio looking to get, at maximum, 13 tracks down. The expected amount to come out was about 10 tracks, but when we left wer were ecstatic to have pumped out 15. Look at it this way: how many musicians head into the studio fully prepped on their songs?

Most musicians/bands write a lot of the album material in the studio! The fact that we ended up having a 30 song set fully rehearsed prior to recording worked in our favour. If there's one tip I can give to striving indies out there -- prep the music. Get it together. Get it tight. Make it perfect live, the record follows very nicely in suit.

We had every song set for the album the day we went in. After that, we simply went down the list, one by one, laying down the foundation tracks. This isn't typical I think, I do believe most high-paid musicians with countless weeks of studio time end up recording track by track, often times redoing many of them because they changed the songs in the studio. We didn't have the time for that. We needed to jam.

After the foundation tracks (scratch vocals, direct line guitar rhythms into the board) we tackled lead vocals. Once that was done (it took the longest) we hammered out the bass lines. Then it was time for Eric to do the lead guitar parts. After that part, we basically did the additional instruments (pennyshistle, concertina, bodhran, djembe, etc.).

Then came the post production. We hired a drummer to do post productive drum lines for some of our songs (what songs weren't completed by the bodhran or djembe). Then comes mixing and mastering.

Mixing is a long process, and depending on the producer and equipment, can take a few days to a few months. Right now we're fortunate to have about one month of mixing under our belt and we're approaching half-way.

Our album, Work and Worry, was started at the end of March and will probably be available for sale in Mid-May. With this in mind, we had a very rushed and brief moment to complete our masterpiece.