Tonight was the second set of recording sessions for Sarah Castro’s new band. This is the same group that I recorded the drums and electric bass parts for a month ago. Tonight was the night for electric guitars, keyboards, and a little bit of experimental weirdness.

Or so I thought.

I got home from work and had just finished loading guitars, amps, effect pedals, bag of tricks, the xylophone, and a couple of little keyboards into the car, when I got a call from Sarah. “Hey, don’t bring any instruments. There’s been sort of a change of plans. We may have to start from scratch.”

“Uhhhhhhhh. . .okay. Is there something wrong with the drums that we already did?”

“No, it’s just that–well, I don’t really know to explain it. Sean can tell you. Just come on over, and he can tell you all about it. We might be redoing drums tonight, maybe.”

So I unloaded all my stuff from the car, and I started to feel really anxious, so I called her back. “Hey, I feel like I’ve just been thrown a huge curve ball here, and I’m feeling really confused. What’s going on? What’s the new plan? Do you really need me tonight or not?”

“Yeah, just come on over, and we’ll get you some food–Do you like ahi tuna? (YES.)–and we can tell you all about it once you’re here.” I grabbed my little bag of drum sticks, just to be safe, and headed out the door. I’ll go pretty much anywhere for ahi tuna.

By this time, I was feeling really confused, and hungry, and tired from loading a carful of instruments twice. I made a mistake with the directions on the way to the studio, and almost got hit by another car while I was turning around in a parking lot, but finally arrived at a very nice studio, located next door to the Wonder Ballroom. It was full of guitars, amps, effect pedals, electric pianos and organs, and a beautiful Allegra drum set (with surprisingly crappy cymbals! WTF?? Wish I’d brought mine…) all mic’ed up and ready to go.

Turns out that the engineer is actually a pretty well-known musician and engineer, who worked on the Shins’ newest CD, among many other things. He told me his thoughts about what we had to work with, and what we seemed to be trying to achieve, so Sarah decided to go with his suggestions. I did too, after they all got me up to speed, so we started to record some drum tracks.

We did two songs tonight. The first one has a very sparse and deceptively simple drum part, almost like a ‘looping’ pattern. After a few false starts and technical mishaps, it took about three or four tries to get a good, usable take. The second song calls for a very ‘tribal’ drum part, with big toms and dark cymbal crashes for the entire first half of the song. The second half is where I switch to regular drum sticks, and pretty much just rawk out as hard as possible. Total blast, and it took just three takes to nail it. The end of the third take had a particularly good feel to it. After the cymbals faded out, in my headphones I could hear Sarah and GuitaristJimmy in the control room, laughing and clapping at the same time. “Todd B—–, everybody!” They ran into the drum room, saying, “Oh, man, that was IT. That was the one!”

The thing about playing drums is that the more I do it, the more I want to do it. I keep thinking about creating opportunities so that I’ll be able to do it more often. I keep thinking about what I need to do to my drum kit to achieve the sound that matches what I hear in my head. I keep thinking about what kind of band matches my playing style, and would give me the opportunity to play at my best. It’s really exciting to think about that.

So now it’s looking like tomorrow is the day for keyboards and experimental weirdness. There will be guitars and amps there already, so I’m bringing the xylophone, the Omnichord, the Casio SK-1, the toy piano, the amp that’s the size of a pack of cigarettes, and the cello. I have no idea what we’ll end up using; maybe all of those things, maybe none of them.

I can’t wait for you to be able to hear some of this stuff.