Studio Day 3
November 30th, 2009 | By Kal
No, you haven’t missed anything, this IS studio day 3. Our first two days were back in October, when we put down piano tracks and guide vocals and you can find out about our exploits here and here.
Back to day 3, and it was refreshing to start off with some basslines. We are using a method called track recording. This means that rather than just play everything at once and record that, we record each instrument one at a time – which kind of makes sense as there are only two of us! When a band track records songs, they would usually record the drums first, then the bass, and then the rest of the song. Without drums, the basslines were the next best thing to get our song ideas sounding song-like.
The first song I got to add a bass part to was I Wanna Know and before long I’d worked on Island… and Something to Me.
The order of the day meant that electric guitar came next and I can report that I managed to rip a couple of solos – which is obviously the dream.
After a quick spot of lunch we were back in to the studio with an afternoon of acoustic guitar. I don’t know how many acoustic guitars you will have seen, but for me there are two types. The type you can plug in to an amp – ‘electro-acoustic’ – and the type that you can’t. For these parts we each used Rob’s guitar, which is an electro-acoustic. However, rather than plug it in – as would seem obvious to me – we went into the booth and played into a microphone.
This was the method that Rob used, for example, to record an acoustic part for All I Ever Wanted, and it added a more ‘natural’ sound. The recordings allowed you to hear every sound coming from the guitar, not just the note, but the sliding and percussive sound of the strings.
In and out of the sound proofbooth, playing acoustic guitar, the afternoon seemed to pass very quickly, but we got a lot done. If we are anywhere near as productive tomorrow as we were today, then we’ll certainly have some very new-sounding songs to upload for you. As ever, I will post a blog tomorrow night telling you all how we got on. Tomorrow we’re due to really get into Can’t Help Me Now, and we’re planning some big changes. It might finally show what the music in the project is going to be like – constantly changing. You’ll have to head over to the Songs section as soon as we upload the new versions, to have a listen and tell us what you think.
Anyway, speak soon, I’d better get some sleep, as we’ve got a long day ahead of us, tomorrow!
