Organize all your crustaceans in a row...

In hopes to encourage others to participate in the future by challenging the all too familiar word “daunting” from RT’s legacy, I want to provide a much clearer image of Lobster Shanty’s goals and organizational methods.

Because Lobster Shanty is a collaborative effort between Nick Puglisi and myself, it’s a different challenge than most face.  We have twice the manpower, but our work flow needs to be incredibly clear-cut.  We both live in different cities--Nick’s in NYC, and I’m in Boston. To be able to effectively (effectively is a loose term...!) write tunes, we use any and all methods of communication and data transfer: Text message, skype, email, gchat, google docs, drop box, yousendit, filedropper, facebook, and occasionally telephone.

Although no music is written or recorded before the event starts, we really try to plan, prepare, and organize ourselves as best we can to be as efficient in the process as we know how to be.  In fact, Nick has been reading and researching about how to be more effective in his mixing efforts for the past 2 weeks like a mad man.  I’ve been gathering gear, preparing instruments, thinking of themes, and scheduling days in my rehearsal space in which I am able to record.  Not only is recording drums a major undertaking (you can’t easily record acoustic drums in your apartment within the city...), but so is ensuring that you record vocals at hours in which you aren’t hearing a band blasting the walls in the room next to you.  All these small things that we have experienced over the years can be avoided with a little prep work.

In addition, we know what the foundation of our music will consist of.  It seems like everyone approaches the songwriting process differently, but we tend to go for musical moments and themes rather than writing lyrics that are backed up by music.  Although we may not know how each song will be structured from day 1 or where all the instrumentation will land, we do know that each track will definitely have drums, bass, guitar(s), vox...and will likely have keyboards and percussion.  With these resources in mind, we know that our preferred method to write is to come up with some riffs and progressions, followed by vocal melody, followed by drums and a bass groove, followed by lyrics, then keyboard, with percussion to come last, most likely.  

Like everyone else, we need to fit this week into a week that we have other stuff going on--such as our office jobs.  We used a google doc to better track our time, and have an idea of where we “should” be at the end of each day. We are currently on target, as we have 3 tunes started with vocal melodies for most of the parts.  We're missing a few things though, which will be tightened up tomorrow.


Here's our schedule, as it stands: