Testing, Testing, 1...2...

Kev01
Originally uploaded by onedaylifephotos.

I am just testing out whether we can post up pictures from Flickr straight to our website via the power of blogging....technology is wonderful stuff.

Anyway, we all headed off to the Hammersmith Palais last night to watch Fall Out Boy record the show for their EP "Leaked In London"...I got sweaty down the front while everyone else hung out on the balcony and was too cool to jump around (not a great mosh pit, but you can't win em all right?)

Video camera is back and fixed. We will post videos soon.

Max.

You're not thinking fourth dimensionally!!

So I am super-happy with how the vocals are going...they sound dumb at the moment as there are doubles and harmonies all over the place, some loud, some quiet, some that will probably get cut during mixing, but we recorded them in case we change our minds.

Dan is still ill, but we have got a few days off while he has to go back to his day job so he'll be better when we start back up again on Tuesday (that's another reason why this album is taking so long, we all have jobs ya know!!!

Our camcorder is off being fixed but as soon as it's back I'll post some video journal entries up so you can check out what we're doing.

One of the things that you really need when recording is confidence in your ideas. Things can take a long time to come together...for example our song "Fireworks" is still missing the intro and the middle-8 (come on, you remember us talking about that on schools tour, right?) because we wanted to do something special with it. We deliberately left it out - and we have to believe that the idea will work to make it worth the risk.
I sent an email today for one of those ideas and if it comes together it will be one of my ambitions fulfilled.

I'll report back soon.

Max.

Singing

Ok, so singing is going pretty slowly still.

We have done most of 4 songs so far. I am feeling ill and have decided not to sing on the record....well not until I feel better anyway.

The vocals sound really good at the moment. more pop-like and more full than ever before already.

I was working on string sections for a song called "your foot and the floor" today while max was wondering about the studio looking for lyrical inspiration.

Back to work tonight, after a (this) short dinner break.

dp

Boring post about vocals...

And so we start my least favourite part of recording....recording the vocals. There are a number of reasons why I like this part of the process the least 1) I don't really like hearing my own voice on record 2) it is the hardest to plan out, with harmonies that you thought were going to be amazing not quite working and having to come up with other parts as you work and 3) it's the hardest to perform - you'd think it'd be easier to operate your vocal chords rather than play bass/guitar...but no.

So we didn't get off to a great start. We ran some rough test vocals for the non-album track that we are recording, "Red Lights Mean Go", and they didn't sound so great, so we tested out some vocals on "The 78 Song". Also not great. So I made sure on Monday that we started working differently - making sure nothing was rough and everything was listened to 'dry' (which means we didn't run any reverb, compression, echo, delay etc) until we'd agreed the part was good. Effects were only applied then to give a rough impression of how they would sound in a real mix...a lot of what we are working with at the moment will be turned off when we start mixing (except the dealsy which we accidentally keep getting about right so they'll stay).

So now the vocals sound pretty damn good, there are loads of "oooohs", little high parts and harmonies that we've never tried out before.

The 78 song is pretty much done for the basic vocals and harmonies. Extra little parts will get added all the time as we listen to it and pick out bits we'd like to add, then we'll go through them all when we're mixing and see what works best, what needs to be cut etc.

The best part of all this is singing the word/sound 'whoa' a lot, which requires very little effort.

Like I told you, I am easily pleased.

Max.

Semi Mental

Everyone say 'well done' to Dan - while I took a couple of days away from the studio to get some other stuff done (i'm the only person I know who takes time off to go to work), he cleaned up all the trcks we've recorded so far and made it easier for to start mixing when we've done the vocals.

So what the hell is cleaning up the tracks? Basically, when we hit 'record' the song plays a little before the person recording has to start, so they can get the feel of the tempo, and know when to come in. So before every take there are these little 'silence' section of recording (ours usually last like 2 or 4 bars). But they aren't silent....oh no.....everyone makes little noises, moving hands up and down guitars, clicking drum sticks together, talking a little, fuzz from amps. So it's that stuff that Dan has been cleaning up - we make it proper silence and you'd never know we were so sloppy in the first place - hell yeah!!

It's one of the most boring job in the recording process and big respect to dan for doing it (and saving everyone else the job.

I'm off to record vocals...like, now. Then we bail and head for the UEA to see Biffy Clyro, yey!!

See you all later,

Max.

Radio Ga Ga

Fixed the forum,was making to changes to get less junk posts on there - those stupid things drive me crazy....who the hell clicks on "CoLege Dip-loma, W!!n 1ne nw!!!" anyway?

Recorded the podcast, we rambled on for ages, Dan will cut it down to be a neat little update. All the funny bits that made us laugh get cut because we are saying nasty things about people (not true...ok, a little true). That's what makes us laugh, and why we're going to hell.

Start vocals tomorrow.

Max

Just quickly...

On my way to record the podcast. I just broke the forum. It's quiet these days anyway - i'll fix it when I get back.

Max.

Sing alongs....

We hit target and got the bulk of the guitars done by the weekend. Couple of riffs left to do, but the sounds were eluding us while we were thinking too hard about it, so we'll come back to them later.

So it's time to start singing. We're going about the vocals a little different this time, which is only a good thing. Last CD we just set up a mic, pressed record and started singing - doing take after take until we liked what we had. This worked pretty well, but it ended up a little boring to listen to as there weren't many harmonies, delays etc to make it sound great.

This time we started with 4 mic's (like I've said before, we can't afford a huge range), and tested each one over a verse to see how it affected the sound. The CAD mic sounded the best so we'll probably use that for the bulk of main vocals, but we'll undoubtedly us a Shure SM57 for some others too. Dan will have to go through the process as well to see what suits his voice best.

Next thing is to work on how some of the harmonies and double-tracking in the songs is going to work. Double-tracking is where you record something twice (or even more depending on the sound you want) to make it sound bigger and more powerful. Most pop-songs use double-tracking and harmonies to make the vocals sound more varied so listen out for it.

Some of the words for the record are yet to be written, I'm not panicking - they'll come when they're ready.

Max x

Guitars nearly finished too...

Its late thursday, just got back from the studio. Whipped through Caught In The Crossfire today and nearly finished Caffeine.

We gave ourselves the tentative deadline of geting guitar and bass done by the end of this week. It looks pretty much like were gonna be on course. we have a few litle bits left in two songs then we are done.

Next week recording moves on to vocals, clearly meaning Max and I have to do some singing whooo. I think Max and Maunder are going to spend some time looking into mics and sounds over the weekend.

No matter how hard we try this album still seems to be taking forever to come together. 8-9 hours a day, everyday, it sounds amazing though....!

dp

From start to finish.

Really close to finishing the basic guitars for each song - gotta finish the rest of Caught In The Crossfire, then a song called Caffeine, should be done by the weekend hopefully. I am super-happy with how we've made them sound so far...

Am now pretty much able to play the album from start to finish on my iPod, which feels good. Is it sad that I air-drum along to our own songs while I'm making lunch? I think so.

Max.

Dry Your Eyes

If anyone wonders why this record is taking so long, things like this are why.... we just had to finish the basic bass and guitar parts for a song called Dancefloor today. So we worked out the bass part last night, and I get a decent version recorded along to the drums.
As Dan comes to play his guitar part in, we realise that my bass isn't playing the notes in tune (not my dodgy playing, I promise), the pitch of the notes on the string are off, even though the string itself is in tune (you have to go get the intonation of the guitar sorted out if this happens, but I never play in D so it's never come up before).
Fortunately for us, we have a piece of software called Melodyne that we bought to put our vocals in tune (this will be the first CD we've ever used anything like that, you're ears will appreciate it I hope). We had to go through the whole bass part and adjust all the bum notes, then check it all over (it sounded sooooo much better, that thing was worth every penny).
So we start the guitars again, and about half way through the takes for the main part, Dan breaks a string...not a major problem you'd think. However to make sure that the guitars don't suddenly get a whole lot brighter half way through the song (new strings have a different sound to ones that have been played for a couple of weeks) we have to go back and re-do the parts we'd already recorded.
All of the above took about 3-4 hours....and we still had to do all the other guitar parts...a long day.

I once read an interview with Mike Skinner from The Streets after he took ages to write and record his album. He said that the amount of time it took to create a song became irrelevant as soon as it was finished. You just have to do what you have to do. I hope this album sounds good because we did what we had to do.

Max.

No phone's in the studio.

Dan was super quick and posted up a little clip he took on his mobile today of me playing bass. The track being played very badly be me is called Dancefloor...I will do a real take tomorrow and by the time you hear it, it'll be spotless and sound lovely.

Check me out here.

Max.

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