On April 4th and 18th, we were very lucky to have been gifted the opportunity to record material as a group at the historic Peabody Conservatory - in their state of the art recording studio down in Baltimore. It was a total of four sessions of recording time, plus two additional sessions of mixing and mastering to be done in May. Originally we were just going to focus on four songs to complete for sound engineer Evgueni (Eugene) Opredelennov's final graduate project - starting with initial groundwork tracks on March 21 (which included special guest CRAIG CARMEN from ECHOSEVEN on Drums) and then SKIP NOON from LUTTRELL, NOON & WENGER sitting in on Bass Guitar on April 12. Then Eugene heard our first two albums and was pleasantly intrigued by what we were really all about, so during our last session on April 18th, the four original members of the CMR set up and recorded live sets in the studio... as we would for a concert, each isolated within individual tracks for post-mixing. The result was yet another magical experience for the CMR. It never fails when we are nothing but ourselves. Having finished the four multi-track songs, we just unloaded sets which we (as always) hadn't planned nor discussed, as Eugene continued to show his true talent and passion for recording and engineering. When it was all said and done, with over 100 minutes of recorded material (multi-track & live), everything sounded so good and was so much fun that we decided to release as much of it as possible. Alas, recorded in 4 days, The Coal Mountain Ramblers: THE PEABODY SESSIONS will be due for release later this summer and will total 17 songs. What did we play? You'll have to wait until it's released! Till then, here is a small taste of Tim's new song called "Time to go", along with our special guests.
