Studio Day 5

January 11th, 2010 | By Kal

Studio Day 5!  What a day.

Twelve hours ago, i left my house to embark on a journey across the icy plains of Harlow to meet Rob, who had been held up in traffic.  Somehow, we still made it to Riverway for 2 minutes past 10.  Rock and roll.

Before I get into this, you will notice, at some point tomorrow, that there will not be a Studio Day 6.  Or at least, not in the next day.  That’s because, on Rob’s suggestion, we are just doing one day on its own this time, but the strange thing was he got a LOT done.

First off we started with Rob going in to the booth and playing down Acoustic guitar parts for Vedere and All I Ever Wanted.  Needless to say, Rob “One take wonder” Martin stayed true to form and reeled off great recordings in no time.  The pressure was on for me to deliver and eventually I laid down an extra acoustic track for Irish Girl, a song that you can download free by going here!

To top the morning off, Rob and I recorded a song we’d been wanting to record between us for a while.  The Devil’s Got a Friend, features me on acoustic guitar and Rob on lead vocals – it has a real live feel to it and we hope you’ll be able to give us suggestions of how we can really take it forward when it goes up on the site.

The afternoon featured the use of my electric guitar, to boost some of the tracks.  First off, Rob used it to record a new guitar track for Can’t Help Me Now.  It gives it even more of a summery feel – if that’s possible!  Give it a listen and tell us if you like it.

Then the distortion pedal came out and we all got serious for a minute.  For those who liked The Island Without a Name before, or Becci who requested more rock in our music, I added a new part which should give you the first glimpse of what you wanted, and it really makes the end of the song a lot more interesting.

The rest of the guitar was me adding parts that were almost invisable.  The aim was to make it almost unnoticeable to hear the parts I added to Can’t Help Me Now or All I Ever Wanted, but with the effect that if you took the parts away, you could hear that something was missing.  Did we get that?

You may have vaguely seen on twitter that I was having a go with a shaker on Can’t Help Me Now.  Thanks to Matt for the suggestion, and we promise that coming out of Studio Day 6, will be a version with the shaker.

All I can say is, keep checking the song section and you’ll see the latest versions of the tracks we worked on today.  We definitely felt a lot better coming out of this session than we did the last, even though last time in hindsight we got a lot of good work done.  But as always, we want you to be the judge of that and then give us ideas for February 1st, Studio Day 6.

What I can say for Studio Day 6, along the lines of collaboration, is that we have something very special lined up – we’ll keep you posted. :)