Hey you, and welcome back to another stupendous update from Life Stage! Today, we’re going to pick up where we left off a couple of weeks ago, and talk about our new album, and the new studio we hope to be recording it in. We’ve heard a few folks ask “What’s going on with the band?” here recently, and the truth is: a lot. From working on songs, to setting up some much needed infrastructure our band can grow on, booking a few shows (TBA soon!), and getting this studio project sorted out, we’ve been busy! But again, today we’re just going to touch on this studio project, what it looks like, and how it will effect our next album!

First off, let’s set the scene: Back in May, we started talking about recording studios. We had about 4 or 5 songs completed for what will eventually be our next album, but we needed to go ahead and start thinking of where to record this thing. SO, being that we’re musicians, one of the first things to come up was the fact that, we have no money. In other words, if we actually wanted to record this thing, we would have to raise a whole bunch of dough, in a fairly short period of time. We thought about options, thought about crowdsourcing and the gamut of options there, but then a thought hit us: what if we could cut the cost of recording by using the gear we already had, and the space we already had, to record most of the instruments ourselves – better yet, what if we could just record the entire album ourselves?! That would save us a ton of money, and if we just picked up a few pieces of gear, using the software and limited experience we already had, we could actually make this happen.

One problem though: Though we had enough space to record in, the practice space we had (with a window, a window mounted A/C unit, bare concrete floors, a door that didn’t shut all the way, and only sheetrock on the walls) wasn’t exactly ideal for making a record. This wasn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, but we certainly had to think about what we could do to counter the sound problems in the room.

Now, fast forward a few months to late August. We had just put together our 8th full song to go towards this album, and something crazy came: Ross’ dad, who owned the garage and practice space that had been home to Life Stage practices for years, decided (completely coincidentally) that he was going to do away with that practice space, add a second story to the garage, and build out a new, fully functional, acoustically engineered recording studio upstairs! Crazy! Especially considering that he had really little to no knowledge at all of our progess on the album, and was simply doing it because of some things he wanted to do personally with music.

So where does that leave us now, here in October? Well, after deciding to make this project happen, the ball officially got rolling, and construction began about 3.5 weeks ago – and man they are flying! I don’t think any of us expected the size and scale of this project, nor did we expect this type of progress in just a few weeks. We’re obviously very excited, and you can check out the progress too: just take a look at the pics below that Andy took from his phone. We don’t know exactly when to expect the entire project to be done, but rest assured we’ll keep you posted on the progress! Look for more album, studio, shows, and other updates very soon, right here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.