SnowGhost Music

My first experience with Josh Ottum’s music was driving on the 405 in LA to the airport with my friend Mike Manning, of Mill Pond Records. We were talking about working together more and he suggested that I contact Josh; as Mike put it, he was a perfect candidate for a SnowGhost Session, being a multi-instrumentalist and a self-producer. Artists who were used to doing most of their albums by themselves were, for the most part, very efficient in the studio. Josh was no exception.

I called Josh, who was in Seattle, and stoked his interest in writing some new songs for a SnowGhost session. He was very enthusiastic, and put the word out about this “new studio project” in Montana to some of his fellow musicians. He had the interest and as we got closer to the session, the band was lined up. A few weeks prior to coming out, I got a call from Josh, telling me that the band couldn’t come out, but that we would not let that stop him. He reassured me that he would work to arrange his songs ahead of time in Garageband, so that we had a ‘virtual band’ to jam with. This was actually a very unique way to go about doing a session, and proved to be very effective.

Josh arrived with his girlfriend Kristen on a Thursday. Prior to getting to work in the studio, we made a stop at Mama Blanca’s for some beer and Cuban corn on the cob. I swear that there is something of a crack-like consistency in the cheese that they top the corn off with; I have never been so rabid about corn on the cob. With our teeth chock full of corn, we all agreed that this was a great way to start a session.

He briefed me on the songs that he wanted to get done. As I mentioned before, all of the songs had been arranged in Garageband, complete with electronic drums, guitars, keyboards, and various samples. We imported all of the tracks into Pro Tools as individual tracks so that they would occupy their own space on the console, and then we'd ultimately make a decision about replacing the tracks if they weren’t of the quality we wanted, or could swap it with something that suited the song better. Because there would not be a live drummer, we kept all of the drum tracks as guides, with the hope of replacing them someday. In most cases we replaced all of the soft-synths with analog synths like the Moog Voyager, Waldorf Q, and Hammond B-3. As for the guitars, Josh went through our selection, and like most guitar players, found a different one for every part of every song. Although, he really seemed to gravitate towards Anderson electric and the Redgate nylon-string.

With most of the composition already done, I wanted to allow for a fast-moving session by setting up everything we could think of, to allow us to truly capture inspiration when it hit.

To be continued...