It wasn’t called Overnight Hikes at the time, but I consider the start of this project to be the recording of a simple acoustic guitar/soft-synth loop I called Hello World. I had just purchased the student version of Logic Pro 9 at my university’s tech shop and spent a weekend learning how to use it. That simple loop kicked off what would end up being a long, more serious journey of learning how to record sounds. Wanting to record my own music started long before that, though.

I started dabbling in recording in 2003/4 with a $7 computer microphone (that looked something like this) and free DAW software for PC called Multitrack Studio. The free version gave you 3 tracks to work with. Well, 2 really if I wanted to be able to “master” the song. This instrumental is one of the oldest recordings I can remember actually liking the outcome of.

Then at some point in 2006 or so I bought a Digidesign Mbox2 that came with ProTools LE. My attitude at the time was that I just wanted to be able to easily record some decent sounding demos… and well, ProTools doesn’t really cater to that, or at least it didn’t at the time. It was way more involved than I wanted or had time for. That’s how I remember it anyway. I recorded a few songs using the Mbox + a Blue Baby Bottle mic (which I still have and use), but it just didn’t stick. It was much easier to just use my iBook G4 (pre-MacBook era) and GarageBand to throw down a quick demo.

Fast forward a few years and I hadn’t really done much with music in general, much less recording, in a while. I had a long weekend coming up with a break from classes and work and I just wanted to work on music. One of the few benefits of working near-full time and living “at home” while in college meant that I usually had a small amount of extra money to play with. So when I found out I could get Logic Pro 9 at the student tech shop at a huge discount, I jumped on it. That weekend of learning how to start using Logic and recording that simple loop kick started a long path that eventually led to this EP I’m releasing.

Over the years I’ve cycled through various pieces of gear. From the Mbox, to an Apogee Duet, then on to a couple of different versions of the Universal Audio Apollo units (which is what I’m using today). Between all the busyness that comes with everyday life, I spent what time I could mic’ing things up and trying to figure out how to capture the sound of an instrument as authentically as I could. I believe it was in 2014 that I started trying to mic up a drum kit with two mics, then four a bit later. In 2017 I was able to upgrade to an 8 channel interface that allowed me to put even more mics around the kit. Drums are definitely, in my opinion, the hardest to record.

Fast forward to early 2020 - I had a handful of finished instrumental demos along with a dozen or so almost finished ideas. I knew I wanted to release something this year, so I made the call to make it a 5 song EP. Constraints are good. Making the EP decision allowed me to focus on the songs that were actually done (minus vocals) and not get bogged down in the “almost done” songs. So I started tracking the 5 songs in my home studio and writing lyrics/recording vocals for the 4 that have them. The songs were originally going to be released earlier in the year, but then COVID-19 happened and what free time I had was turned into being a homeschool teacher for my son. Mixing the songs got pushed back to late July/August. (More on my mixing process, or lack thereof, in a later post).

When my mixes were mostly done, I reached out to Matthew Barnhart, who is a mastering engineer at Chicago Mastering Service. CMS came up as highly recommended in numerous searches I did when looking for a place to hand the mastering portion off to and Matthew’s specific work includes some of my favorite bands/releases. Over the course of a few emails, he helped me sanity check my mixes and pointed out some problem areas I should go over again. Once I was done, I handed the mixes over to the CMS crew and Matthew worked his magic. I couldn’t be happier with the final results.

And… here we are. It feels like these 5 songs took years and years to make… but really it was just a lot of trial and error spread over all those years and then tying it all together in a fairly short amount of time.

The EP will be out October 2 on Bandcamp!

Cheers,

Chris