Behind the Scenes. Behind the Sounds. The Slew 2025 recordings begin.

Greetings Everyone!

Just got back from a busy week in the Pacific Northwest. The weather was beautiful, but I honestly spent most of the time recording in a windowless basement studio called The Dynomite Shack. This is the studio of Dylan aka DJ Dynomite D, founding member of The Slew. His studio has relocated a few times over the years, West Seattle, Federal Way, but now it is based in Tacoma, WA.

Dylan and I had a call last December and talked about how it would be fun to work on some new stuff for The Slew when schedules permit. We decided this was the week to do it!

The Dynomite Shack is equipped with 2 drum recording rooms, an amp room with a keyboard corner and a sort of den/effects mix space that is literally packed to the ceiling with various rack effects, sequencers, drum machines and rare gadgets that Dylan finds on his thrift store/pawn shop hunts on his drives home from work. He is an electrician by day but loves to dig for esoteric musical instruments and audio gadgets whenever he finds a moment!

Everything starts with the drums when we're working on Slew stuff. We wanted to have different tones for each beat/track, so each day Dylan would swap out the snare drums from his collection and also change the microphones we would use to record. Finally, we would record the drums through various tape machines (reel to reels and cassette multitracks) that he has set up in the drum booths. We would always overdrive the inputs to get that saturated rock sound. I had so much fun playing LOUD drum beats for the first part of each day. Some of my favorite drum sounds came from a Vesta Fire MR 1, a 4 track cassette recorder from the company that eventually became Vestax. There are some built in limiters on each track and it squashes the drum transients in an interesting way!

There were only 2 of us in the studio for these sessions. One of us would have to operate the tape machines or Protools while the other played the instruments. Sometimes Dylan would play a beat and I would hear a bassline and overdub that. Other times I would play a beat and Dylan would hear some guitar tones on it. Sometimes we were just collecting other layers of sounds on the keyboards and other instruments through effects with the intent that it will all be scratched up and reassembled later off the vinyl.

Dylan had just picked up a Hammond tonewheel organ a few weeks ago but hadn't recorded it yet. It was quite finicky and had required a special combination of running the motor on it and then engaging. LOL. It was like we were trying to start a keyboard version of an old Model T Ford or something!

Anyhow, this montage video shows some of the equipment we used and you can hear some of the process of recording. Again, this is still the very preliminary stage of the tracks but you can kinda hear the skeletal versions of the tracks starting to take shape!

Enjoy!

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