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....