Happy New Year - here's some guitar info...

Hi guys,

Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years, we all did. It's back to work for us pretty much straight away. We have the morning off from the studio so I thought I'd update you. We've done basic guitars for about 7 songs now. We should be done with the bulk of them by the end of the week, we are averaging about a song a day.

For the geeky ones out there: Most of our guitar parts are being recorded using Dan's Mesa Boogie 50w Single Rectifier Head, through his Marshall 4x12 cab. We also have Maunder's Orange AD30 Twin-Channel Head, with Orange 2x12 cab, which we've used mainly for the clean sounds (it's a nice bright amp), or for the fuzzier sounds as the high-gain sounds are pretty hardcore.

The mic's are pretty standard Shure SM57's for a lot of the tracks, although we also have a CAD condenser mic and a Rhode NT1-A, which give a much more brittle sound a lot of the time.

For the 'larger sounding' guitar parts like chorus sections, we've recorded Dan playing through both amps (we have a pedal that splits the signal from his guitar and feeds it into both amps) and put 2-4 mic's on each amp. We then decide which ones we like and panned them out (that means we can move them left to right in stereo...like moving them from one headphone to the other if you're listening on your iPod). We mess around with different delays and move each mic until we like the sound. This process seems to take us between 10 minutes and an hour and a half until we're all happy....we would gladly take longer, but we wanna get this record out before we die.

We would love to have more variation between guitars, heads, cabs and mic's but we are limited by our budget so we gotta make the most of what we've got...they sound pretty cool at the moment though.

So that's what we're doing, it's not big and it's not clever....but it keeps us off the streets.

Max x