Well at last I’ve come out of the studio and it was such a great 2 weeks. So starting where I finished on my last update we continued to work everyday and all the final tracks were put down. Luke did some wonderful violin work, Toby did some work on my ‘secret track’ and Jezz Moondog did some harmonica, Myles came in to do some vocals and I finished all the vocals. Finally Tony put down all the backing vocal harmonies.
I have taken video snippets of the tracks being done and for all those who aren’t aware of the recording process I’ll give you a bit of a run down of what I know about it. There are a couple of options when you decide to record a song or album. You can either do a live studio recording which is where the whole band set up and it is all recorded live and usually it takes a few takes or it could take heaps of takes. It’s a great way to do it because you can often catch the spirit of the song and the people involved in it but the down side is it can be really difficult to get a take that is perfect and you often get bleeding through the mic’s….so sound from the guitars might come through on the drum mic’s or sound from the vocals might come through on the guitar mic’s so it makes it very difficult to mix evenly.
The more standard form of recording is in the studio one track at a time. So this means putting down a guide track first to a click (metronome). The next stage depends on the producer everyone has their own way of doing it and some would say do drum track first and others would say guitar and so on. We put down the guitar tracks first, then the drums and when Tony did guitar and drums he either used my guide vocal track to get the essence of the melody and song or I just sat and sang it in front of him but of course I could only do that when he was doing the electric guitar and bass not drums and acoustic guitar. The bass and electric guitar are plugged in so we can talk and make noise when recording is happening but when the drums and acoustic guitar are being recorded we have to be super quite because a condenser mic’s is being used.
I thought I was just going to give a simple explanation but it’s got a bit lengthy so if you already know all this sorry ;o) I also have to reiterate that everyone has their own way of doing things so this is just the way we did it and I quite like this process. In the videos you can see that each person is doing their take and they have either very small ear plugs in or headphones. They can hear the guitar and vocals through the headphones so they just play along…..it always sounds a bit funny when you hear the other instruments separately but once it’s mixed it sounds awesome. I didn’t manage to get Jezz on harp unfortunately but I got everyone else.
Here’s Jezz putting down harp track and Myles doing some vocals and Luke putting a violin track down
I have put these on youtube and they are unlisted which means not open to public and only available if you click on the link here. So you should be able to access them.
The next stage of the process is for Toby to edit and mix all the tracks and then they will go for mastering. Claire has already done the artwork and Peter Caron is going to photoshop the album cover which I need to write all the words for. Then once I get back from my Sydney tour in April I will get them cut and send out a pre release to a bunch of allocated Radio presenters.
The next exciting thing happening is my NSW tour so I’ll give you an update on that very soon.