Mixing the drums

After a few days off to go and see Pearl jam, it's back to work on music. I had a treat to come back to -our drum recordings. It's always good fun mixing drums cos you add Eq and variious subtle effects to each track bit by bit and the sound just keeps on getting better. I'm happy with how the drum tracks turned out. You can hear that it's a pretty beaten up drum kit, and the room could have been better, but providing the durms don't need to be super high in the mix, I think it sounds pretty good.

Day 6 - recording with Tamira - Drums!!!

Despite advice against it from almost eveyrone I mentioned it to, I decided that since Tamira can play the drums we should take a go at putting drums on at least some of the tracks. Drums are notoriously difficult to record have them sound good, but in line with the "lo-fi/let's just do what we can" nature of all my music endeavours we decided to rent a studio for 3 hours at Melody line and see what we could get out of a beaten up old drum kit. 

Tamira kept it simple didn't make any mistakes and we managed to reocrd her drumming 2 takes on 4 of the tracks.... who knows what it will sound like mixed. 

 

 

 

 

Mixing Hugh Burke

Months ago on a drunken friday afternoon, I recorded Sandra and Hugh Burke playing a few songs each. Hugh is leaving Amsterdam, so I finally had an excuse to mix a few snippets that I had of him playing and sent him to him. They sounded lovely!!

Recording Lee Clark - Day 1

Today I started recording som songs for a mate called Lee Clark. We're not quite sure what we want yet, he asked for a 3 song demo, but we might go for the full bhuna. We put down about 7 rough takes so that I have an idea about the sound of his voice and his guitar. He's a fast worker. I was pretty happy with the results.

Adding Guitars to Tamira's tracks

I started recoring additional guitars for tamira songs. I start with Onverwacht bericht - her only dutch song. I want it out the way, cos I struggle to listen to the dutch singing over and over again when I'm mixing it.... then I chose Shut up and Kiss me cos I really like that one and I didn't want to sicken myself when we'd just started.

Trying to be creative on a Monday evening :-(

I finished off most of the open Mike mixing... and then tried to put down the makings of a song idea that came out during the Jam Session... lazy-arse-itis got the better of me and before I knew it I;d ran out of time.

Sorting... mixing... tidying..

I had a day of sorting out audio.. the session with Tamira... the open mike... the Jam at melody line.... today I could have saved about 3 hours if I had double the RAM I had... I'm not much of a technology junkie, but if I had the room, I'd have a new computer by now.

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.

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.

Quiet Queen's Day

Queen´s Day is a strange day in Amsterdam. It is the biggest party of the year, so having "done" about 5 Queen´s days it is an event similar to a Scottish Hogmannay where you spend the majority of the day feeling like you should be having more fun than you are... trying not to get drunk too quickly.... and wishing that if the music has to be so loud could we at least limit it to one source. A few years ago, I decided I´d seen enough orange people drunk on Heinekin for a life time and vowed that I would use the bank holiday to get away for the weekend. This year, however, I wasn´t organised enough and I´m just back from a weekend away, so I decided to use the time to catch up on a backlog of music work. While the country looked like this:

I was sitting behind a pair of speakers being productive.... 

A day spent mixing

I made rough mixes of all tamira's stuff... it took me ages... but it's sounding excellent... if only I was good enough or someone was stupid enough to pay me to do this for a living.

Mixed Tracks

Now that my hi-fi is fixed, I can mix on something other than headphones again.

I rough-mixed Sandra's tracks from yesterday and made mp3 of the ideas we recorded. I'll give the mixes a second listen before sharing them with anyone.

I finished some scribbled lyrics Kenneth and I had started on some of our Eastern European adventures.