The story of Frisbee began way back in May of 2020 when Jon Ginouves AKA 'Joniouves' was playing Frisbee with his girlfriend. Jon decided to sit down and write a quick song inspired by Joe Satriani.
The next day Jon recorded a little demo and emailed it to me and our bass player, Will Walker Heaton. Jon asked me to record some drums. After listening to his demo, I knew this song was going to need some awesome drums. The song was complicated, with time signatures I had never played in before.
I buckled down and recorded drums for the next month or two. Every day before work that summer, I would record drums. I learned so much about playing drums and recording that summer, it certainly changed my life.
According to Jon "the song disappeared for a few months" until he "got an email containing a finished drum track".
After we got back from the summer break, Jon, Will and I met up and recorded some Bass.
This is likely a point in time in which you're wondering, "Ethan, If the song was written and drums and bass were recorded back in 2020, where is Frisbee?"
Allow me to explain:
The song was plagued with technical difficulties.
After recording and editing bass and drum tracks, we moved on to the fully fleshed out guitar sections. As soon as we began recording, it became obvious that there were two large sections of the song where the bass was out of tune.
We would have to re-record the bass.
This may sound like a simple task, but for a group operating out of basements with almost no money, it was incredibly frustrating. In order to record, I would take all the sound equipment and load it into a car, drive 15 minutes, and unload it all in Jon's basement.
To record bass, Will would also have to load his bass amp into his car and drive it to Jon's house.
Naturally it took us a long time to get around to re-recording the Bass tracks.
Additionally the original guitar tracks we recorded were far too loud. Jon's amp, an EVH 5150 is incredibly powerful. Coupled with the high amounts of gain and the doubled part he wrote, the song began to sound nearly like noise.
After recording the guitar tracks a second time, this time with less gain, we were still stuck with an incredibly loud guitar part that enveloped all the other parts of the song.
Fast forward nearly an entire year.
After working on a number of different songs, we decided it was finally time to finish Frisbee.
We re-recorded the two bass sections. But the guitar parts were still too loud!
Luckily I remembered an old mixing technique that I figured out one day back in 2020 while I was digging sprinklers for my dad.
The idea was inspired by Tom Scholz, a legendary guitarist, songwriter, and sound engineer of Boston.
The technique, which I won't go into detail on here, is extremely effective. Luckily I had inherited a piece of gear from my father that was essential in creating the sound.
Finally, after all the core pieces were finally put together, Jon asked me to add some "Synth Frosting" to the track. An entire blog post could be dedicated to my Synth frosting...
Tune in next week!
I'll have a link to the song and more information about how we made it!
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