REGINA ZERNAY: Hi. I'm Regina Zernay. I'm the bass player for Cowboy Mouth.

[REGINA ZERNAY PERFORMING WITH COWBOY MOUTH]

It’s really like split up. We spend half the time in the studio with a producer we're working with, Rusty Cobb. You know who that guy? He's real cool, real cool. And so we were in his studio in Atlanta and we had a lot of fun and he was great, really easy to work with, and we worked with a guy named Jim Ebert. He did Kelly Ripa with us, and yeah he's the guy who produced "Easy" with the band before I joined in and stuff, and he's great. We just had a great time working in the studio because it's cool because you get in with the producer, and there is more than -- This is what I discovered working with this guys.

It's more than just like they plug in, they get a good sound. It's also like okay for the song we want to do this or we have this idea about throwing this change in and stuff. They help like shape up how it's going to be. It's like they become like a fifth member of the band. You hear that all the time. It's totally true.

Okay, so the other half when we were recording, what we did was we each have like studios at home, and we're all running on Pro Tools so we did some long-distance recording, so when we're at home and stuff and we're trying to finish up the record and we couldn't do it, maybe not necessarily on the road, Fred would lay down tracks and then he'd MP3 them over to us and we drop it in to our different Pro Tools sessions, and then like do a high-quality track and then email the high-quality track back so you can take it into his session and just drop it straight in, and that's kind of like the beauty of like digital recording in the modern age.

Now with everyone getting Pro Tools like I myself just have the most inexpensive unit. I have the Mbox, and it's like the old-school Mbox three or four years ago and then Pro Tools LE, but since I'm only doing like one track, just doing like a bass track or maybe I'll drop in like a couple of bass tracks, you know, for the song I'm thinking of, in particular for "Lord Knows I'm Drinking", I just did a single bass track so I ran my bass into a little Presonus tabletop, desktop compressor, very inexpensive, and then just ran that into so I can get a little compression going on my bass and then straight into the Mbox which has like it's got -- It's made by Digidesign and it's got those Focusrite preamps and so it shapes up sound really nice. I love it, I love it. It was a great investment for the less than $500 that I spent on it and then the $1,200 that I spent on the Mac that I'm running it on, it was like one of the best investments I ever made, so I just ran that in and recorded the bass track, you know, did a little bit of punching in, try to avoid doing too much because it does get -- it starts to sound a little choppy. I mean you can crossfade and stuff like that all you want but if you go a little too far, anyone who like does any home recording, they'll catch it real fast so.

And then I just took that and sent it straight over to Fred, and it was all long distance. You know, there was no like he didn't exchange anything, no hands changed or anything like that. It was all through the internet and on the computer, which I think is amazing, you know.

PATRICK OGLE: And no pains in the butt lining stuff up like nothing ever got out of sync between any?

REGINA ZERNAY: No. I just dropped it right in. Just dropped it right in because I mean what you get is -- Your viewers or your readers I guess they're pretty like gear savvy because we're talking about Gearwire.Com.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. [INDISCERNIBLE]

REGINA ZERNAY: Yeah, so they know what it is. You know, they're sitting there and they got their Pro Tools session, and assuming they haven't done anything too tricky that's like beyond what I understand how to do, you know. If you're going pretty straightforward, you take your mix, you do that thing, or you do that thing, it's a file. What is that called? Help me out here. It's this when you do your bounce.

PATRICK OGLE: Yeah. You bounce down. Yeah.

REGINA ZERNAY: You do your mixdown. You bounce down to an MP3, and MP3 is good for that kind of thing because it doesn't matter the quality that you're getting on the receiving end because you're just basically laying down a track to go along with it, so you get that, and he just did like a very low like not a real like big file so you could just send it over to the internet and you just drop it in, and of course it starts and ends at the same point that it starts and ends in your Pro Tools session, so there's no like --

PATRICK OGLE: So you're not recording into the actual track. You're recording along with an MP3.

REGINA ZERNAY: Right.

PATRICK OGLE: And then because you play straight through...

REGINA ZERNAY: Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: ...the timing's right.

REGINA ZERNAY: There's no problem with timing, and what you do is when you're mixing down, all you do when you bounce down is you solo your track, the one that you recorded and that you did all your modifications to or whatever. I can say that with Pro Tools I was nervous getting it because it was a -- I knew it was a steep learning curve, and as it turned out yeah. It took me some time. I had to spend about six months really like well you know it's like anything. You got to like really want to do it, you have to have a project that you're working on, and then when you do, you run in to all the trouble that you're going to run into and you figure out how to make it work, so yeah I mean but do it. Get the hard stuff out of the way, get the learning curve out of the way, and once you do, you can do stuff like it's just really economical like if you have like song that you want to do and you don't have a drum kit at home or you're not maybe able to record drums, you can go into a studio, say like, you know, "I'm running Pro Tools. Can you guys like create a Pro Tools session that's got the drum tracks?" and then take all of that and take it home if you have a strong enough system and just like record around it, and you save yourself so many hours and so many dollars in the studio...

PATRICK OGLE: Right.

REGINA ZERNAY: ...because you can just like record it into your house. What I mean is that if your really wanted to go cheap, you know, where not cheap. I guess I'm just thinking in terms of, you know, you need to have a certain like level of computer to take all the tracks in.

PATRICK OGLE: [SOUNDS LIKE] Or it'll just take forever because it's so slow.

REGINA ZERNAY: Yeah. Exactly. So you know, if you trust the guy that's recording your drums for you, and you want to like do it on like three tracks as opposed to 20 tracks maybe, you know you can do that as well where you can just take just like the, you can bounce it down into like a really good quality like WAV file and drop that in and then record the rest at home, so, you know, it just -- it'll save you a lot of money and time, you know. And plus you sweat at a studio, you know. When you're sitting at home, you can have like, you got a cup of coffee, doing it in your pajamas, whatever.

Everything you see has its place obviously, but for like demoing and stuff like that, don't break the bank if you can't. You know what I mean? Like if you're going to spend $1,200 going into a studio for a day, or you can spend $1,200 like creating a studio for yourself that you take the time to learn how to use, why not? What have you got to lose, you know. You know, later on and the end of the line, you know if you wanted to, and it just turned out to be a disaster, you can still have the equipment you bought for half of it. It'll only cost you $600 to give it a shot. You'll be wiser for it for sure.