Tamira and Neil - Live @ Mollys

With Sandra off on an Iberian adventure, I needed some help for this Month's Open Mike. Tamira willingly obliged. Preferably we would have had more time to practice, but I got held back with finishing Sandra's album. It's interesting how the mood changes when you add something else to the mix. We were able to rely on stuff we had prepared from the jam Session’s a little, and they were tried and tested so we knew that we could knock them out no problem with Stephen and Javier as well:

We did an excellent version of These Boots were made for walking… we had monitor issues on Crazy train, and we had chord-forgetation problems on Paranoid by Black Sabbath.. then I sang a few of my regulars…

and then Kevin took the stage for a set:


He’s a human juke box with much more capacity to entertain a crowd than I have.
After that – we had a first for the Open Mike’s at Mollys – a guy got up to give some poetry readings:

In times gone past, I’d like to think that poetry sat side by side with music in Irish bars… but alas times have changed and he was faced with a tough audience… still he gave a good ten minutes of various poems that he had come across on his travels, before I got up again and sang Lola by the kinks cos Katy had requested it.
Tamira sang some of her own songs, then I did some… then Kevin finished us off.. It was one of the better open mikes - - a good packed bar and a happy crowd.





Audio from the show here and here

Art work and packaging

We've not had the luxury of time during this project. Sandra and I messed around with recording for a long time, but we needed the deadline of her going on a trip to really get our arses in gear. As a result we're working to the last minute, so for printing of CD's and artwork, we can't take advantage of the myriad of offers out there that will pakcage up your stuff. After spending a lot of google-time and even telephone time talking to companies about costs lead times etc. I realised that I was trying to rush job 500 CD's when there is no way Sandra was going to travel round Europe carrying 500 Cd's in cases with her. I decided 100 Cd's we're burnable by hand and then focused on the art work. 

As always the art work is by kenneth for www.keep-it-creative.com It's excellent being in the position to offer him "professional"  projects, cos normally I'm badgering him for last minute changes to open mike posters etc. 

The art work is based on Sandra's guitar. We had "creative differences" as to how it should look. Kenneth and I wanted simplicity, Sandra wanted complexity. After long video conferences on skype,  we eventually settled on this:

We had solved the issue of CD burning, but we still needed album covers/cases. For this we opted for bulk printer drukland.nl. They had a 3 day delivery and it all looked good. I didn't read the small print though and by 3 in drukland counting is 12 in normal counting. Great prices, great online service, great product variety. DO NOT use if you are in a hurry. In an attempt to run my music endeavours like a business I didn't lay down and take it and after 40 emails back and forward in a mixture of Dutch and English that contained such temporal gems as "Friday IS 3 working days after Monday. Sir!"  I have 10% off my next order. The drawback is that Sandra left Amsterdam with spindle of 100 CD's and the covers are in the post to Madrid where she'll pick them up.

Other than an afternoon loading a CD drive and an afternoon folding and pasting covers, 625 CD's cost:

625 blank CD's - EUR187.50(These are off the high street and could be much cheaper)

625 album covers - EUR178(www.drukland.nl)

Price per CD -  58 euro cents...

If we charge my recording, engineering and mixing time, the price obviously goes up and then you have Kenneth's graphic design time... but 58 cents is a lot less than it used to cost me to make copies of CD's with covers...

Mastering the Mastering

Some of the tracks for Sandra's album have ben last minute specials, but I'm not ready to do the mastering.

Mastering is super deluxe highly specialist process of preparing a track for public consumption. We're strapped for cash and time, so I'm doing it on a pair of hifi speakers in a living room using Garageband, some free plugins and Audacity.

Sandra's tracks are pretty simple, there are no drums and usually very few instruments taking up space on the track, so I think I get away with my meagre setup. It's also a home/lo-fi recording so I don't think it benefits from unrealistic reverb and a lot of effects. I mix the track down and separate the stereo and non-stereo material so that I have two tracks. Then with each of these tracks I do a little light peak limiting, normalisation and multiband compressing until I'm quite happy with the signal. I give the stereo file a little bit of stereo enhancement. This I do in audacity, cos I can see the wave better etc. Then they both go back into garageband and I mix them together, maybe adding some more compression across the track or some really light EQ. I found a really nice plugin called Pro-Q from fabfilter. It costs, but I used he 30 day free trial. You can see what oyu are doing and drag a tight band filter across the EQ spectrum till you find a sweets pot and then mess around with the Q setting till you add some subtlety.

Once I've got it sounding good, I take it back into audacity to top and tail it, sort any clips and then max out the volume as much as I can while retaining some dynamics.

While there is no doubt that a professional would do a better job if I paid him a grand or so, I think the process has been a great learning experience, and the results fit the bill given the lo-fi nature of the project.

Jesus has risen!!!

Thanks to Ascension/Hemelvaart, I have 2 days off to make a 4 day weekend to catch up on all things Sandra. I made an interesting version of “raise your sunshine” from an old isolated vocal track that was lying around. I pulled another 2 tracks from a really early session I did with Sandra, my mixing of her guitar has got better though and I was surprised how good I was able to make the tracks sound. 5 down 7 to go.

Progress is slowing though; It’s starting to feel quite daunting to get this all finished in the next week before Sandra leaves. What was previously a lot of fun is now starting to feel a little like creativity on demand. As I probably suspected if I was honest with myself, my ambition will have to be curtailed a little, and if I have a decent track, I don’t have time to experiment with 20 different ways of doing an additional guitar. At the end of the day if the room I’m recording, mixing and mastering in isn’t up to much then I shouldn't be too perfectionist about what we can achieve.

Another late night Jam.

Tomorrow is a public holiday in the Netherlands so the Jam session is packed. We have Aron Levin of the Heaters from Cincinnati warming up for his show on Saturday and various other people that don’t need to work tomorrow. Sefi is going back to Israel so it’s the last time we’ll see him for a while.

Sick and still working...

I spent the night puking ... so I've taken the day off to drink green tea and experiment with Mastering. The tracks don't need to much mastering but I can't decide whether to bring the peaks up with audaity and add some basic compression or whether to use a mastering plugin like Ozone... my sick body seems to be too tired to be able to tell, but I'm going to plough through some basic tasks so that there is more material there when I'm ready to use it.

More recording.....

The whole weekend has been spent recording extra parts and testing out rough mixes.... Sunday Afternoon Tamira and Stephen came round to practice a few songs for the open mike and they got the debut listening of "Burn out"

Friday off for recording

I could get used to these 3 day weeks... May this year is going to be my month of recording, mixing and learning to do a basic master of home recorded tracks. We finalised the "Born with a Tail" and "Burn out" recordings and I put together a rough mix. I added some cello to "burn out" which us a cheap way of making everyone love the song/mix.... but I think I can get away with doing it to at least one of the album tracks and it sounds pretty good... 2 down 10 to go.

Liberation Jam

Sandra is leaving at the end of the month. Her departure has finally given us a deadline to work towards for finishing her CD. We´re aiming for 8 studio tracks and 4 live tracks, so Wednesday was spent recording bits and pieces of vocals and assembling some rough mixes of the tracks. We also recorded guitar for "better to burn out than fade away" and "born with a tail". 

Afterwards we headed down to the mine for the Wednesday Jam Session. it was eally well attended:

 

Sandra brought down several friends including Pierre Corneille who took the first videos from our Jam Sessions:

Easter weekend

Quite a weekend. We surprised Karolina with an Easter visit from Kenneth. 

On Saturday I performed my first ever DJ set for the Grunge night in the mine. I really enjoyed it, but I have a new found respect for anyone that can do it properly for a living. It´s one of those jobs where you're never really that busy, but you never really stop either. I played a pretty decent selection of grunge, while knowing that anything I put on from Ten or Nevermind will get a massive cheer from the crowd. I suppose that sums up whatever grunge is for most people. 

Would I do it again.... yeah I suppose I would... but with the work involved, I'd have to either get paid or gaurantee like minded music tastes in the audience. 

We recovered from our late nights and hangover by having the best Easter Sunday since they stopped being rated by how many chocalte eggs you got. 

Karolina and I cooked up a storm and had an open house... this will definately be an annual thing....