2nd Album Recording Diary – Part III

The Rest of September – fucking around with things/ Fucking around with the keel

I had a few days away from it, then got stuck back in. Over the 7 studio days Whitty recorded vocals to 12 of the songs. We do the remaining three in our practice room which will henceforth be called THE STUDIO. Then I get on with Drum/ Bass editing and vocal comping. I didn’t do much, but there’s 15 songs to get through. It’s quite often minor stuff – there will be one bar out of 32 in a verse that I decide could be better, so it gets the nip/ tuck treatment. Vocal comping is more fun. Basically, singers rarely just sing through the song once when recording. We’re looking for the best of the best here. Usually, I’ll get Whitty to record the whole song through two or three times. This serves a few purposes. It helps us both get into the song – remember all the little details etc. It warms up Whitty’s voice, and it lets me set up various record-y type things like compressors, mic volume, a monitor mix for whitty to sing along to etc. Then once we’ve got three takes, we’ll start doing bits section by section – I’ll offer suggestions, Whitty will concentrate on delivering the lines to his absolute best.

The end result is that by the end of the session each line is recorded a minimum of three times, and sometimes there will be as many as 10 takes to choose from. I’ll go through all that and take the best bits from each take to make one performance. It takes time, we’re talking maybe 1 or 2 hours per song.

2nd Album Recording Diary – Part II

4th-10th September – Drum and Bass + Vocal recording/Laying the keel

Mics and Mics!

I’m buzzing round like a toddler who’s been given too many sweets. DRUM RECORDING IS MY FAVOURITE THING. BASS RECORDING IS MY FAVOURITE THING. STUDIOS ARE AWESOME LOOK AT THE MICS NO LOOOOOOOK!!!!!

Seriously, I’m sure I’m particularly insufferable when I’m that excited. But it’s fun. We’ve hired a studio for 7 days to lay the drum and bass tracks. We do them together because it’s more fun and there’s something tangible about a recording where people are actually playing music together.

7 days may seem like an age to record maybe 70 minutes of music but trust me, it really isn’t – it’s an intense week. Because you’re not just playing the song once, and you’re not even just playing. You’re changing heads, tuning kits, playing the song once, huddling round and talking about parts, performances, sounds. I’m constantly vigilant for the sound of a drum starting to warble out of tune, a mic being knocked out of place. Some songs are easy – a warm up take, then a keeper. Then another just to make sure the keeper can’t be bettered. Some songs are not easy. A warm up. a discussion about changing part. Another warm up. Three takes. “Come through and listen”. What’s working? What’s not working? How do we fix it? Is the sound right for the song? Ok, let’s try it again. Two more takes. In the middle of third take, someone audibly farts and the room mic picks it up. Hysterics ensue. One person laughs a bit longer than is sane. Hmmm. Coffee break, let’s get our heads reset. The next take is the keeper take. All the while, the clock’s ticking.

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Mez and Alex

Once we have a keeper take, we listen through and make sure we’ve captured the magic. Sometimes Take 5 is the keeper, while take 3 will be terrible except for one amazing drum fill that could never be beaten, while take 1 has a really cool groove in the last verse. We’ll edit those bits into the keeper take if we think it’ll make is better. Also, with the keeper takes I’ll usually let little bits of bass fuck-up slide in favour of an overall feeling of awesomeness, so once we’ve got the keeper Alex goes back in to punch the odd bar here and there.

In the end, 7 days is about right. On day 1 we get the studio set up, re-skin and tune the drums, try a few mic setups to see what best captures Mez’s sound. Alex comes in, we sort out his bass rig and get recording. By the time we leave, one song is in the bag and another, probably the most tenuous of the 16 on the list, is scrapped. It’s just not going to work without more time. Now we’re down to 15.

Then we get on with it. ~3 songs of drums+bass a day, and Whitty comes in the evenings to lay vocals down. We’ve rented an awesome old vintage ribbon mic, his voice sounds awesome. On the last day we do some acoustics, congas, and some backing vocals. Truthfully, I wouldn’t have wanted day 7 to be particularly intense. It was a long week. Much coffee was drunk. Many flying saucers were consumed.

2nd Album recording diary – Part I

Here’s a glimpse into what we’ve been up to. I’ll liken each phase to building a ship, because that’s an analogy that surely won’t have to be stretched to fit into the beautifully convoluted recording process.

July August ’14 – Preproduction/ Dry dock

We have some songs. This is the vital bit. Recording sessions run much more smoothly when you actually have a song to record, this much should be obvious. But more important than that, sessions run more smoothly when you know what you want said song to sound like. The more decisions we can make now, the better the album is going to be. This can be pretty general (How long shall we play this bit for?) or very specific (If I’m going to use this amp for this part, should the bass be bright or thunderous to support it? Should we tune the drums high or low?). We play the songs in the practice room, we make decisions. Things are slightly rushed due to our oncoming tour of the north with Diatesseron, so I feel a little bit of pressure.

Josh working on pre-production.

The work gets done though. By the end of August we’ve got 16 songs ready to go – I have much fun recording guide guitar tracks at home, and thanks to the door of my little study not closing properly at least two of the songs feature cat noises. Underrated, IMO. And probably the first recorded sound that’ll actually be heard on the final album.

I’m pleased we’ve got 16 songs at this point. At the start of the year it felt like we had about 5 that weren’t dreadful. Then it went up to more than 20 that the band was tossing around (plus a few more that I demoed but didn’t feel right for CH). Now we’ve whittled it down a little to the ones that seem to make most sense together. The age of the album might be at an end but society can screw themselves, I want a shiny CD that means something to me.