Day 9 - recording with Tamira

Tamira came round tonight with Kevin O'Donoghue, for what should hopefully be the penultimate recording session. I was quite apprehensive about Kevin coming round; he has a lot of experience in recording studios and I'm not quite sure of what his opinion was of our little set up, it turned in to a good relaxing eveing anyway. He sang some backing vocals on one of Tamira's songs and they sounded amazing. He was a phenominally quick worker... quickly learning the tracks and coming up with vocal lines for it.

Day 8 - recording with Tamira

The artwork is finalised and we're just adding the finishing touches. I'm trying to call as many of the tracks close to final as possible, but every track seems to need one or two little things rerecorded.

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. 

 

 

 

 

Day 5 - recording with Tamira

We continued sorting vocals and adding extra guitar parts and then took some photos for the album cover. Kenneth Clarke is going to do it again. Let's see what he comes up with. 

Day 4 - recording with Tamira

Today we tried to tackle a few of Tamira's harder songs. She's very adventurous with her songwriting and she gives herself a real challenge in the vocal melodies she writes. A capo will help with some of them but the range between the verse and the chorus on a lot of her songs will really be a bitch to get perfect in a recording.

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!!

day 3 - Recording with Tamira.

we had a pretty good session - going over lots of the songs, and adding various extra bits and pieces.

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.

day 2 - Recording with Tamira

We re-recorded several of the original rough takes where the structure wasn't correct.

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.

Day 1 - recording with Tamira

Fresh off my recent recording prowess that I developed with the help of Sandra, I'm going to record Tamira. Day 1 was spent getting a rough recording of each of her songs so that I can have a listen and work out what to do with them.

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.

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:

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....