Studio day 2
October 30th, 2009 | By Kal
7:00am Up bright and early again. I was eager to be ready and get back to the studio, although somehow, I managed to leave the house 10 minutes late.
9:50am (Still got there early!)
10:00am We got going straight away, as we’d left everything out. The studio was a bit of a mess – clearly we would have claimed it was due to “all the creativity”.
11:25am A small break from recording as Jim went to Tesco to get some lunch before the lunchtime rush! Rob and I, for insurance purposes (!!), were locked out of the studio with just a pair of guitars. In the ten minutes, we’d managed to work out a fairly nice acoustic version of I wanna know – one of our tracks.
Early Afternoon We were way ahead of schedule, and conversation drifted, The last song we had to record was Something to Me, which Rob and I are a little more familiar with as it is one of our oldest song ideas.
5:00pm We packed up the piano, Jim coiled up all the wires and magically, the room seemed about twice the size. All we had to do now was listen back through all of our recordings, quickly decide whether the piano needed to be louder, or whether we needed to turn down my vocal, and then save everything we had. Jim created a CD for us of all of the “mixed down” versions of our tracks.
6:00pm Finished, without a minute to spare.
6:03pm An onlooker with a dodgy mind might have smirked if they looked at Rob’s car going along. We were listening to the CD on a normal car stereo system – the tiredness having hit us – we were going a bit crazy with the celebrating! The tracks sounded ok, they sounded good. All they were was the piano part and two guide vocals recorded at speed, but on a regular sound system, they sounded a hell of a lot closer to songs than we had ever thought they would!
6:30pm We got back to Rob’s house, and put the CD on his stereo system just to check that the car hadn’t been tricking us. It was still fairly good! Ross arrived, he of Mubla 2.0 podcast fame, and listened to the tracks – he looked fairly impressed, which was the best news we’d heard all day. Of course we were going to like the tracks, and knew the songs inside out having written them, but for someone outside of that to hear what we’d made and even just nod in appreciation was a big thing.
7:00pm After setting our mics up in Rob’s room and precariously balancing the camera on a chair, on the landing – perfectly poised to fall down the stairs – the three of us recorded our second ever podcast. We spoke about the day and also listened to one of our tracks – All I Ever Wanted, which has one of my favourite harmonies.
7:45pm We headed to the pub for a celebratory pint, and then a Chinese take away. I felt like we’d earned it. Rob and I were excruciatingly tired at this point, but managed to be sociable before it was time to call it a day. We’d spent the past 4 days playing musical all day: two days of rehearsal and two recording.
The clock was and is still ticking. Since Tuesday, Rob has been working tirelessly to get some video footage of the studios and the podcasts ready. We have uploaded the music that we created, and I would be personally grateful if you could give it a listen and post a comment there and then. If you want a good track to start on, I would pick The Island Without a Name or Vedere. Rob’s favourite of the 7 is Can’t Help Me Now. What do you think?
