See This Is Why I Can Say 'Guitars', Plural

Hi, my name's Ben and I'm currently directing the new Fresh Prince of Bel-Air movie.

Sometimes the sweetest things happen over the shortest time. It's sort of like when you know there's only a short time for something to last, or a short time in which to get a job done, everything becomes a lot more vital and focused. Luke and I had this experience the other day when we recorded the acoustic guitar tracks for the album.

The optician in me abhors this picture. Or should that be aberrates? OPTICS!

It only took about four hours to record all of the parts for eleven songs, which is - even for someone who normally records pretty quickly, if I say so myself - pretty quick. Luke is a master of setting up to record a great sound within a short space of time and as always creates a more-than-conducive environment for people to record in. Aside from being a talented engineer (as well as every other studio role he fills), Luke's one of my best friends - we always talk a load of shit when we hang out (and the thought's crossed my mind that a load of our talks about everything from delay times to astronomy somehow work their way into the music we record) and the sessions always start to feel more like the music happens while we aren't looking. This happened with the acoustic guitars and before we knew it, some bugger had come in and finished all of the recording for us... I like to think this was also partly a result of having intentionally extended the writing and recording process over a much longer time so far than I have done previously. It means that the songs feel a lot more natural and almost habitual at this point, like either I've been playing them for years, or they're simply playing themselves. That can happen, right?

I've been throwing down acoustic guitar parts on my solo recordings for a fair old while, even just to add a bit of depth to the guitar sounds. A lot of the time, there's an extra presence to acoustic rhythm parts that fills out the electric guitar sections and, I think, gives everything a bit more vibrance.

The other nice part of laying down the acoustic parts means that not only is that one great big box we can tick off on the recording process, but I can also use the fledgling drums-bass-acoustic recordings to work on the other final guitar parts while I'm away from home over the next couple of weeks. When I come home, we'll be diving straight into recording those, then it's onwards and upwards to the heady heights of vocal tracking.

Until then, though - I love you all, leave me some comments to read, ask me some questions to answer, spread the blog around... as I get closer to finishing recording  the album, it's going to get even more interesting, intense and action-packed!

YOU ARE UPDATE!

- Ben