It’s been a few weeks since the last update, and things are progressing nicely. We’ve had a couple more weekends in the studio, jam sessions round mine mostly working on keys ideas, plus Shane’s been busy working on the production side of things. The first weekend we’d decided to tackle Out of Spite, and the vocals for Dark Ideas and Tied to Shadows.
Out of Spite was the only album track that we hadn’t already made a start on, as we were recording just vocals and guitar for it; rather than as a full band recording with drums etc. like for the other album tracks. I headed down to the studio Friday evening, joining Marc and Shane who were already down there. We’d discussed how we were going to approach the performance, opting for a more laid back approach, free-time paced by the flow of the vocal, rather than to an instrumental rhythmic pulse or click. It consequently meant that we had to get a simultaneous take of both the guitar and vocal in one go.
As well as the Neumann U87 mic that we’d been using in previous vocal recordings, we had a couple of Gefell mics, plus a Brauner Phantera, which I was interested in trying out with a view to perhaps adding to my home studio set-up at a later date. Unfortunately one of the Gefell mics had a technical fault, and the other Gefell positioned off-axis wasn’t really picking up much of a signal, and at the very low sound volumes I was singing at, had too much self-noise in its signal chain to be useable. When we’d played the song live at a few acoustic shows it was a more powerful vocal sound, partly through necessity, as the vocal could easily be lost behind the volume of the guitar in such an environment. In the studio we were able to take a different approach, almost whispering the vocal to the point of break-up, which gave a very different, up front personal sound. For guitar Marc started off with his acoustic guitar DI’d like we would live, however it wasn’t really the sound we were after, and decided to use the 335 once again. We put several takes down, happy with the general vibe of what we’d recorded, leaving it for another day for Shane to pick out the best takes.
Saturday we’d opted for another evening session, giving me chance to watch Blackpool away at Crystal Palace that afternoon. I met up with friends in a pub before the game, sticking to soft drinks, and vowing not to shout, chant and cheer during the match. Dark Ideas was probably the most melancholic track we had to record, and two minutes in to the game, and Blackpool already down to ten men I was starting to wish I’d gone straight to the studio, the slight upside being I’d be in the right frame of mind to sing like I was feeling miserable. The dark clouds weren’t to last though. Against the odds, the ‘pool battled their way to a one nil victory, playing some great football at times. I managed only one slight lapse in not shouting, but that was the ref’s fault, failing to award an early pen much to the disdain of the travelling tangerine faithful. I made do instead with some vociferous clapping and miming that would’ve done Mr. Chaplin proud.
I left the ground feeling jubilant, managed to catch the next direct train back to Watford, and stuck Radiohead on my iPod in the vain hope that it’d wipe the beaming grin off my face, and get me in the right frame of mind for sticking the vocals down. I didn’t succeed in making myself feel suitably miserable, but it turned out not to be a problem. We got the main vocal takes down that we needed, returning in the morning to add the last of the chorus harmony parts.
Sunday we had planned to record the vocals for Tied To Shadows. We spent quite a bit of time trying out different techniques to get the sound and vibe that we were after, such as getting close up on the mic for certain sections, and singing the track with different levels of aggression and despondency; this was after all a song about being tied to an addiction. We got some reasonable takes down, but we weren’t entirely happy with the vocals in the chorus. I was starting to get a little tired vocally, and as happens after singing for a while, was losing some of the richness to my vocal tone. Although what we had was ok, we decided that we could probably get a better take another day, so left it there for vocals, having had a pretty productive weekend.
On the Monday the following week Shane and I were back in the studio to put vocals down for Coked Up. We had a listen through, and were pretty happy with the guide vocal from a previous session, that was already down. We put down a few more takes, paying particular attention to the chorus section, which we thought may benefit from the layering of vocals takes, ready for the rest of the band to put down their backing vocals for that section at a later date. We also rang Marc from the studio to discuss ideas to rework his vocal in the breakdown section, which I’m looking forward to hearing.
That completed my band involvement for the week, with no Wednesday jam session as I was away in Seville to watch Spain v England. It was nice to escape the weather back home, swapping the snow and ice which was just about resisting melting away, for a few rays of sunshine, a game of football, and the chance to relax for a few days away from it all. I returned on the Sunday, a marginally rosier shade of place, with some new song ideas scribbled down, and some pictures of chalices and clocks on the camera that I thought might possibly be of interest for future artwork ideas.
The following week we were back to our usual Wednesday jam session, which we used to go through some more ideas for keyboard parts for the album tracks, sorting through Tamma Connection and Alarm. Friday night we were back in the studio, to revisit the vocals for Tied To Shadows, which we recorded down without too many problems.
Saturday morning we were back in the studio to look at the vocals for When The Karma Falls. We put down a few takes then decided to try out some
production ideas, adding effects on the verse and bridge vocals. We re-recorded those sections again to get a performance that made the most of the accentuation of the breathiness. Having experimented singing the chorus with different amounts of attack, and mindful that we wanted to add some additional harmony parts to it, we decided to move on to recording keyboards, and come back to that section on another day; hopefully with the added benefit of getting a richer vocal sound from the start of a new session.
Marc and Rob had arrived down the studio after lunch, and Rob was ready to put down the first of his keyboard parts for the album. First up was The Chalice. Rob spent a little time playing along to the track, tweaking the synth sounds out of the JD8000. With the sound sorted he put down a few takes, with him and Shane taking turns controlling the speed of the arpegiator. Leaving that one to edit another day, we moved on to Alarm, for which we already had some keys ideas down in the chorus. Rob had however come up with some really cool spacey sounds for the track when we’d jammed it round at mine during the week; adding what I could best describe as the final layer of icing to the track. That was soon sorted, and the recording completed for yet another album track, with just the mixing and finals production steps to be done.
There was one remaining recording task to complete that day, which was to re-amp and effect the last note of the chorus in Dark Ideas. It also proved an opportune time to discuss renaming tracks. Dark Ideas had been a working title, which we’d never got round to changing, after a fair amount of brain-storming between us we came up with a new title of Apperception, which I think nicely suits the meaning of the song. We also had a bit of a think about renaming Out Of Spite, but didn’t stumble upon the right title straight away. Shane had been busy during the week mixing Apperception (Dark Ideas), and we had one effect left to add, which involved feeding the held note at the end of the last chorus in to the memory man pedal and Fender reverb, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place as a special-fx sound in Doctor Who. We listened back and all agreed that adding an extra layer of sound to the end of the track worked. Leaving another finished track for Shane to finish mixing.
Wednesday saw another session round mine with Marc and Rob, with Shane joining us a little later having finished work down the studio. We’d tried several ideas for adding keyboard parts for Perfect Soldier and No Easy Target, but were coming to the conclusion that they probably didn’t need keyboard parts, and that Rob would probably be better off playing one of Marc’s recorded guitar parts when we play it out live. The other track we looked at was Tied To Shadows, where Rob already had some cool progressions, but we were trying to get an idea of what sort of sounds would best fit with the track, ready for recording it down in the studio at a later date.
On Thursday Marc, Sonny and I headed down to the Function Rooms in Hemel Hempstead for the regular Juicebox night, this time in association with BBC Introducing. It was a good line-up with bands from across the 3 counties area, and also chance to catch up on a few band bits with Sonny too. It was a fairly late finish, the last band The Raid, having a number of issues which dragged their set out a bit. Having dropped Marc back, I had a song idea wriggling around in my head (BPYBBO) as I was driving home. I noted down the idea when I got back, switched the lights out and went to bed. My brain had other ideas though, thinking up new permutations of the ideas for the song, forcing me to scribble them down before finally getting some sleep.
We’d discussed the idea the night before of having a bit of a jam Friday evening. Marc came over and we worked through some ideas for new songs, some that we’d already worked on previously, a new idea of Marc’s, plus a brief look at BPYBBO, for which I had rough lyrics and melody ideas for, plus a beat in my head. The time went quickly and it was soon gone midnight. Saturday evening Marc was over again, this time armed with a drum machine. We began the session programming in some rough drum patterns for Apparition and NWBGLDTU, a couple of new tracks we’d jammed through as a band, and are likely to be amongst the first of a growing list of new songs to come in to our live set. With that done we moved on to BPYBBO, starting with programming the drum machine with the rhythmic pattern I had in my head. I sang my melody to Marc, and having established the key, worked out chord progressions for the bridge and verse sections of the song. We jammed out a rough structure for the track, and were pretty pleased with the way it was turning out, with what we thought was a nice hook in the bridge. We still had the chorus section to determine, and Marc came up with a couple of different ideas which worked with the verses, for which I still needed to work out vocals for. It was again well gone midnight, and we called it a day. I woke up in the morning and finished off the lyrics for the verses, and continued sketching out lyrical ideas for the chorus. Meanwhile Marc recorded down an instrumental demo of what we had so far, and I was able to work out a chorus melody and begin piecing the lyrics together. All in all a productive songwriting weekend.
We’ve made quite a bit of progress with the album during February. Tomorrow evening is our first recording session of March, which sees me back in the studio to do the vocals for When The Karma Falls. With that done that just leaves us to have a look at the vocals for Tamma Connection (yes we’ve renamed that one slightly too), which would then only leave us with backing vocals and keyboard parts to record, plus any additional production tasks before working towards the final mixes. It’s been a long journey to get this far, there’s still quite a bit of production work left to do, but it’s getting pretty close now. 
So there endeth another long blog. I really should get round to them more often, but things have been so incredibly busy the last month it’s been tricky making time.
Stee J
