John Peck (American Steel)
SPB: With the band spread out geographically, how did you approach writing the new material? How was it different than songwriting in the past?
Peck: As we started preparing for our recent shows, we added one new song each from Ryan and Rory to our rehearsals. With me living overseas, practicing these songs (and indeed practicing in general) was particularly challenging. Ryan, Rory and Scott recorded demos of the new songs with scratch bass tracks, which I used to learn them and write my own parts. While it meant more work for everyone, demoing the songs and listening back to them ended up being beneficial to the recording process. For the actual recording, the drums were tracked in Oakland with scratch bass, bass was tracked in Berlin and sent back to be added to the mix, and the final guitar and vocal tracks were added at the end.
