The end of the recording process is pretty firmly in sight now. In a spectacular display of bullet-dodging, my throat managed to sort its shit out in time to record the last three main vocals yesterday, including two of the hardest songs to sing on the album. I'd like to go on record and say that Luke's invention of a cocktail, the Swiss Tony, probably had a lot to do with the last-minute recovery (you should ask him about it here), as well as a few cans of Emerge. Don't ever ask what goes into Emerge, because you probably don't want to know. Just know that it was chemical-ridden enough to get Luke and I through a very long day of recording.
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| I would say 'unscathed', but it did get weird. |
Long days in the studio always have the potential to become a bit soul-destroying if you're not careful and to be honest, I don't know who to say has it worse: after the first hour-and-a-half's worth of recording vocals, Luke had to wade his way through a lot of technical mixing (so things like chopping up toms and making drums sound right before they can sound good) - on the other hand, I had to watch Luke do it with very little ability to have any useful input through this stage. Don't get me wrong, I am totally dedicated to my album recording, with every second spent in rapt attention to what's going on with it at every stage, but it's still pretty tough when you get to hour six of 'the back of Bondy's head'.
I should probably point out that we still have a great time together in these duller, more grinding recording days. Not only do we get chance to talk a lot of shit, but these are also the days when song 'set pieces' tend to come together. At the risk of this being an infuriatingly vague point to make, I don't really want to tell you much about the specifics of what I mean, but a few of the songs on the album have sections or ideas that in themselves are taking a lot of work to get right. I'm incredibly lucky that I can come to Luke with ideas like these and have him know, almost instinctively now, what I'm talking about doing - as well as have him suck up my woolly, unhelpful descriptions of what I'm thinking and exude more than enough patience to stay sane when an idea for a ten-second section of music ends up taking two hours to get right.
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| For once, I'm not referring to the time taken to record my vocals. |
Where we stand so far, then, is with all of the main vocals recorded, most of the album's synths laid down and most of the boring legwork of mixing done. We're next back in the studio in a couple of weeks to lay down vocal harmonies, some secondary guitar lines and the rest of the synths; I should have a pretty much finished album after that coming weekend. Scary.
With that in mind, I've continued laying out the initial thoughts for the album release schedule and the launch party. Once a couple of the dates and venues are set in stone, I'll announce plans - I can say, though, that I do mean 'party' and not just 'gig' for the launch. This album's shaping up to be my favourite thing that I've recorded, with a writing and recording process that so far has been as fun as the end result is going to be good - the launch party is going to be the end to this process that it deserves, not just a celebration of some pretty good new music being born.
Ok, so the really interesting stuff will start happening soon - for now, I need to get back to going over these songs and figuring out what they're trying to tell me they need. With the stage they're all at, they're finished enough that my subconscious is starting to judge them as finished products - unfortunately, they're really not finished yet, so it's all too easy to start fretting about how a vocal doesn't sound right, or an instrumental section sounds empty. In this uncanny valley of recording, where the album is just close enough to being finished (without being finished) to be off-putting like an almost-human robut, it'd be easy for confidence in the recording to begin ebbing away with every listen. It's absolutely the time to keep the faith and know that it's going to be refined into a pretty cool album very soon.
YOU ARE UPDATE!
- Ben
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| That's one big green door |
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