How To Survive Recording 101

Well, it's the summertime and that means a lot of things. Vans Warped Tour is out going which means you can head out for a whole day of sweltering, blistering heat while possibly catching a few good bands and a shitload of bad ones.

Summer also brings some pretty sweet thunderstorms, beach vacations, and unfortunately for those involved in the bbq industry, like myself, the 4th of July.

Fortunately, I had recording to look forward to, and while I could go into the day to day synopsis of recording, I'll get into the basic essentials you will need while going to record at a studio that is out of town and when you will be gone for more than 2 days.

1) Cell phone: Of course, it's our link to the outside world. From here you can call family, friends, late engineers (love ya Lee!), or generally spend the entire day texting.

Now, while spending the entire day texting people (primarily girls) may SEEM fun, it leads to a constant downfall.

Note: You are 4 hours away from home. So any game you are spitting at some fine honey trying to get some p in the v (or p in the b, p in the t's, p on the t, p in the e, etc.), it ain't happenin. No, she will not drive 4 hours to come see you on the SMAAAAAAAAAAALLLL chance that you may get 30 minutes to yourself.

Note: It'd probably be a bad idea to have a girl with you during recording anyways (see previous blog).

Now you can throw away your inhibitions and step up your game and start exchanging nudey pics with these fine females, but generally what you'll get from your phone is 'miss you!' or 'ilu!' (is it that hard to type out?) text messages.

Unless your phone's ringtone is 'Tequila', in which the entire room breaks into a giant sing along and dance, I'd keep the phone on silent.

Necessity Scale: 10/10

2)Laptop: Now HERE is the godsend of being in the studio. From here, you can do almost anything, from spend 4 days downloading 3kb of the blink182 discography that you've been downloading for the past three weeks (me), to watching a girl smoke a cigar in her vagina (BRAD AND GADGET...and me and Lee).

Unfortunately, just as with cell phones, there is a pitfall to having a laptop. That being the urge to masturbate.

Usually you can just pull up something on Youporn or something and just whack away at home, but at the studio it's different. There's no feasable way to jack off while 4-6 other dudes are there (not to mention some coffee lady who just walks in out of nowhere to deliver Lee's 'usual').

Which, it'd be weird jackin it in a studio anyways, so you definitely figure that you can jack it at the hotel room. Right? Right?

WRONG.

And, please tell me if you can think of ANY discreet way to carry a laptop in the bathroom with you.

Now the worst part of not being able to masturbate at my own pleasure is definitely the morningwood. However with four guys all up and going to the bathroom at all different times and my need to feel to hide my boner from my best friends to avoid being ridiculed, I usually can't make it in the morning to have a good whacking before it starts acting like it's a chilly day in Michigan.

Fuck.

Necessity scale: 9/10

3) DVDs: Now here is something that really is a good thing to have (so long as you have a tv to watch it on, which luckily we did).

When you get to dvds, you have a total array of things to choose from to bring and watch, from a great Ahhhhnald action flick (Who is your daddy and what does he do?), to a comedic Jim Carrey movie (We're going downtown!).

And then there's porn.

We got to Earthsound Studios and immediately became excited at the site of a porn case sitting on top of the entertainment center.

Which got stifled immediately when we opened it and realized that SOME CUNT stole the dvd from Lee.

Now this completely crosses a line. There are very few 'guy rules' that we are set to follow, but one of them is definitely Thou shalt not covet or steal another man's porn.

Luckily we (and by we, I mean Allen and Brad) had a season of the Batman Animated Series to watch, and they did...in a day.

So don't just bring A dvd, make sure to bring more.

Necessity Scale: 7/10

4) Video Games: Unfortunately we (Allen) didn't discover the greatness of video games at the studio until the last day or so, but once he did he was hooked like these sluts we saw on latenight HBO were to dicks.

And once we got on our laptops and discovered cheat codes for these games, it became even more fun watching Allen use a health code right before some cocksucking gangbangers smoked his bitch ass so he could fuck them up, or it was pretty good watching him skate around as random ass characters in the Tony Hawk games (I still don't know where Spiderman or Jango Fett came from).

Necessity scale: 7/10

I'll be on later to unveil more necessary things for the studio, but my band is telling me I'm committing faggotry for sitting in the corner writing a blog.

Later - Jay