Hello, folks!
So very much has been happening in the recording of our debut album, and it's about time I gave a few thoughts about our most recent session last weekend. We went into Tremolo with the aim of recording the remaining five songs for 'Unexpected Sunshine', read on to see if we made it!
Saturday, 13th July
Angela arrives at my house at 10:20am, with a car full of drums. I add to the chaos with three guitars and my pedal board. Oh, and me. We get to the studio to find the door locked, which isn't a major shock, as we are a bit early. While we wait for Dan to arrive and unlock, we wander around the neighbouring premises, which are holding a clothing & furniture sale. Paul arrives, and the three of us peruse the items on sale, including a large, framed photograph of a gorilla giving the finger. I expect that got sold quite quickly into the morning.
Angela sets up the drums in the main studio room, Dan sets the microphones up around the drum kit while Paul readies his bass, and I set up my electric guitars & pedal board in the control room. Dan puts a mic & stand out for me, and we start recording drum & bass takes, plus guide tracks of guitar and vocal. We get through three songs, one of which being a last-minute addition to the album tracklist, a song we're deeply familiar with, but spend the longest time doing. (It's always the ones you know the best that catch you out.)
Matt arrives with lunch for everyone, and we eat a hearty lunch of baguettes, salad, salami and crisps, and fruit, followed by some rather delicious doughnuts. ("These doughnuts are gooey," comments Paul, to which I reply "That is because they are full of goo." I am not a food salesman.)
One song left to get the rhythm section down, a song called 'The World Tonight', for which I have set a complicated rhythm, and a potentially fiendish drum part, and is a song Angela has been sort-of dreading taking into the studio, for fear of taking a long time over it & having to keep stopping. She, as always, rises to the challenge, and knocks it out of the park. In only a couple of takes, we have a really solid rhythm section down for the song.
I then go into the main studio room with my acoustic guitar, and we set about dismantling the drums and doing a solo take of 'Imagine If We Fell In Love'. We are still wondering how to tackle this song, and so I will play it solo to a click-track, and we can figure out how to dress it later. While Dan surrounds me with microphones (I think I count six or seven), Paul and Angela go on an ice-lolly run. They walk past the studio door (which is kept open as long as humanly possible, because of the heatwave), and Matt follows them, clacking two coconut halves and galloping. Matt then returns to the chillout room to eat the last nectarine.
I am ready to do a take of 'Imagine If...', which means Dan has to turn the air-conditioning off, because the sound of it would ruin the recording. I do one take, which doesn't feel quite right, and in any case I fumble a verse, and there's a pause while he rewinds the tape reel, and I swig from a huge bottle of water. I do another take, it feels much better, and the air-con goes back on, and Paul and Angela return with lollies! Matt being the only one of us wearing a white linen shirt, he spills a Fruit Pastille lolly on himself.
Matt goes on to have four lollies, and after the tape reels are transferred to digital, the heat mixed with a sugar rush causes him to add steel drums to The World Tonight. He is perhaps surprised that I think they sound perfect. He also plays some spellbinding piano on the last track, which is truly beautiful.
We adjourn for the day, pretty much 8pm on the dot. It's hot, we've worked hard, and there's no need to overdo it. We pop to the Sneyd Arms in Keele Village, and enjoy a nice pint of drink, outside in the warm evening air. A man pulls up in the car park, and asks us if this is the pub that's doing kareoke. We tell him we have no idea, so he goes inside. Two minutes later he returns. It isn't.
Sunday 14th July
I wake up early, and send my bandmates text messages with a link to Queens Of The Stone Age's track 'Hispanic Impressions', with a caption "Imagine putting headphones on an excitable Labrador. Now imagine piping this through them!" Another 11pm start, with a plan to get guitar tracks done in the morning, then do vocal takes in the afternoon, followed by further keyboard jiggery-pokery, then some backing vocals.
Dan & I set up an amp, plug my tuning pedal through the guitar, and start off with re-doing a lead guitar part for 'Yesterday I Was'. It's been on the original demo, and was bugging me that I hadn't tried it on the record. Stoked with success, I get through our last-minute song addition, and also add guitar to Matt's piano part that he did the previous day, not much at all, but it adds atmosphere and makes the song portray the feel of our album cover! Matt arrives, and asks Dan to press the intercom button. Through my headphones I hear: "Don't text Matt an hour before his alarm's due to go off, because then he'll arrive on time!" Oops.
I then move onto 'This Rod I Have Made For My Back', and have little bother with the rhythm part, and I then have an urge to try a guitar solo. I fluff the first couple of attempts, and so Dan suggests that while I am trying to get that right, Matt starts working out keyboard parts for the song. Cue forty minutes of going over and over a lead break while occasionally hearing MAD NOISES coming out of the headphones that I've left on top of a nearby speaker. Matt calls me in at intervals to hear the sounds he's toying with, I give them my seal of approval, and Angela and Paul (who have gone out for a lunch run while I've been locked away in the studio room), return and announce that lunch is served! I insist on getting my lead break down while it's fresh in my head, and after a few runs at it, am finally ready to eat.
We eat a similar spread to the previous day, and it's the best kind of lunch when the weather is how it is. We watch an episode of Adventure Time (the one with the Door Lord, in case any of you are into it!), and I am eager to get the last track done.
I swap my Cort Sunset (which I play in standard tuning) for my custom Fender Squier Telecaster, which I play in DADGAD. As it was the previous day, lunch immediately precedes 'The World Tonight', so I get tuned up and ready to roll. Then the wheels fall off a bit.
Now, when you're on your own in a recording booth, it's really exciting when everything's going well. You race through rhythm guitar and lead breaks (even when you're stumbling a little and re-taking it's okay, because you're working through it), and it's thrilling. When you hit a stumbling block, and everyone's having a crisis meeting that you can't hear, it's a bit frustrating. This is has happened once before, and it's what happens to me now. If you're ever having studio time, get straight to the same room that everyone else is in, it does help to stop you overheating and getting frustrated.
My guitar's intonation, it is eventually revealed, is off, because no matter how much I tune the guitar, as soon as I go up to the 12th fret, it sounds slightly out and spoils the recording. It's not the kind of problem that knackers the guitar for gigs etc, but for the album recording it could do with not having that problem. I have two starts at recording a take, but get no further than the second chorus both times.
I stand stock-still with my guitar while everyone in the control room is presumably saying "Yes, that sounds out, I don't know why," while I am in the studio room, just desperately wanting to get from one end of the song to the other. I can't quite hear the problem with the guitar either, which doesn't help. Dan comes in and fiddles with the guitar a little while I strum chords, I hope to heck that's solved it, do another run and we stop short, even after trying it with another guitar.
I am starting to get a grump on, because I don't want there to be anything wrong with my lovely guitar, and I just want to play my part and have it work the way it has up until now. Dan suggests tuning my bottom D-string to E for the time being, which might feel a bit weird, but it'll sound about right. I do this, it works fine, and my mood eases back up after a stop in the pits.
I work through vocal takes for all the songs we've done, which are completed with minimal fuss (thankfully!), and there is another lolly run. We start to adding more keyboards for several songs, and in a further lolly-induced intoxication, adds marimba and tubular bells to 'The World Tonight', and begins giggling uncontrollably.
We lay on backing vocals to one last song, then are forced to call the weekend's work to halt, mixing down the five songs that we wanted to do (and did get done!), and racing off to The Old Brown Jug for a show headlining Andrew Tranter's Song Club.
What a night! Some great acts playing, including Jim McShee, and Headsticks (of course), and we are more ready to bang a show out than we thought. Two solid days working, laughing, even eating together, have bonded us more tightly than usual. By the time we're set up, we're ready to play the songs we know backwards, and even the new songs, which we have never even gigged. We burn through eight songs, including two of the new studio tracks, and they feel good. Before playing 'I've Still Got Your Blood On My Curtains', Angela gets my attention and says "Really go for it!" and we do. I am jigging and swaying everywhere during the set, more energetic than I've ever been, and the four of us seem to have one, long, out-of-body experience.
The show ends, we pack up, chat to people, we make new fans who happened to be in the Jug by chance and really enjoyed us, and we hug, reflect on the weekend's work, and go home to listen to the mixes and form our plans for the next recording session.
It's good being in this band.
John xxx
P.S: Regarding my earlier reference to 'Hispanic Impressions', it's this:
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