I've just realised that I never told you all about the day we had recording drums the other weekend, so here goes:
Luke, Frank and I hit the studio pretty early (for us) and started by importing the demo for each track into its new home as the guide we'd use to then lay down all of the final instruments. These demos are shall we say 'not of the best quality', but like ugly kids, I have to try and see past the acne and overbites to their potential within. These little babies are the caterpillars, now become chrysalids, that will give rise to things that are hopefully a little bit more beautiful over the course of the next couple of months.
A day's recording wouldn't be complete without a little creativity in the face of adversity - in this case this came when Luke cast his eye over the live room and said "Hang on guys, I'm missing... three microphones. And stands. And where are the XLR leads?". The actual answer to this is 'they're in the back of my Dad's car, from that gig what we played at the end of last year', but I insisted that we didn't dwell on details (particularly which lanky, bespectacled musician's 'fault' it was) and instead Luke got down to Bear Grylls-ing together a decent drum mic setup with whatever gear hadn't been scavenged. Luckily, necessity is still the mother of invention and we ended up with a very, very nice naked drum sound indeed.
Once this was done, Frank, as always, was an absolute machine when it came to playing - this time round, we'd broken our previous recording tradition of having his first listen to the songs on the actual day of recording. With chance to mull over the songs for a while before we went into the studio came so many of the lovely rhythmic motifs that generally come from gigging a song for a few months before recording. The best way I can describe it is that Frank went from, at worst, laying down exactly the right beat for each section of each song - at best, he was hearing ideas that I hadn't even considered within those ugly little demos.
We finished recording all of the drums and bounced rough mixes of each song to take away and listen to before recording bass. Even with the drum tracks in the roughest of rough states, it's difficult to describe what they've added to not only the demos, but the very ideas of the songs in my head. The general style of the album is coming together now - since I started writing the songs for it, I've felt like I've been keeping the best parts of the previous two recordings; now that the drums are down, I realise I might have laid the groundwork to not only let those best bits creep in, but also to reintroduce the best elements of what Joe, Frank and I wrote together back in the mists of time. We'll see, I guess, but as I say - I'm very excited so far.
Next week we'll be spending a day laying all of the bass down; then, Luke and I plan to try and spend some time getting all of the leg-work of mixing and giving sounds to the drums and bass done before I'm going away for a couple of weeks. What this'll hopefully mean is that when we come back fresh to recording to get the guitars and vocals done, it'll almost feel like the Editing Pixies have visited and taken care of all of the time-consuming tom-chopping and compressing for us. With a near-finished rhythm section at our fingertips, it'll free up a big chunk of brain-space to be creative, rather than to worry about all of the slightly-less-pleasant grinding work involved.
That's the plan, anyway - I'll let you know how I get on!
YOU ARE UPDATE!
- Ben
P.S. I'm sorry for the lack of pictures that are relevant to this post; here's an alpaca:
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| It's a camelid. |
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