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....

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.... 

Karolina's birthday jam

It's been a busy week with a trip to Scotland for my birthday, straight back to an open mike night and  now a Jam night for Karolina's birthday:

Sandra's last Open Mike for a while

NFS is no more... first fraser got too busy with Coco's Mine, and now Sandra has to give up the open mike nights for the summer to go travelling. We had a great last night with Sandra.