I was going through an old drawer last night and came across an e-mail I sent to Tracy over 10 years ago concerning Ocean Machine.

Anyway, some of you guys might find this informative:

Q. Just out of curiosity, roughly how many audio tracks did a typical song off of Ocean Machine contain. Out of these, how many were used for vocals? guitar? bass? synth?

A. There were 20 tracks of drums, 6 of guitar, 2 of bass, 4 lead vocal, about 100 background vocals, about 14 tracks of keyboards, and 6 tracks of samples per song.

Whoa. And wtf, did definitely not expect multilayered drum tracks?

[swervedriver]

I think you should read that as twenty microphones used for the drums: bassdrum, snare-top, snare-bottom, toms, hi-hat, cymbal overheads, ambient mics, etc. That's still a lot though; we used 8 mics to record a basic drumkit with 3 toms and 2 crash cymbals, a ride cymbal and a splash cymbal. Used 2 overheads for the cymbals and one mic for each other piece of kit. I could imagine using another mic for the snare-bottom, an extra overhead and maybe a few ambient mics, but that would still only total 12/13 mics... Was the drumkit for OM really huge or was it all mic-ed up to hell?

Damn, I would love to have the OM multitracks (although chances are they'll never see the light of day/are gone).

Holy shit Dev, PLEASE release producer's editions of the albums....