Studio Day 8

March 9th, 2010 | By Kal

Coming just 10 days after Studio Day 7, this one really crept up on us, but we really got a lot done!

Coming off the previous two sessions where Dave and Matt had come in and done their thing collaborating with us, it was a real shock to our collective system getting in the booth all day long and not just sitting there in awe at the work of one of our collaborators.

It was Rob who took the brunt of the work in the morning.  ”Lead vocals need to be there before backing vocals go down,” I groggily pointed out first thing in the morning.  And as we both warmed up, we were able to put down vocal tracks for all of our songs apart from Vedere.

I’m particularly fond of Rob’s main vocal on I Wanna Know.  We did several takes, and were going to stick with quiet a safe take, but on his last try, when Rob sang the first Chorus , I knew we had to go with it.  I might elaborate what I’m most proud of in a separate blog, but my crowning achievement of the day took about 10 seconds to do, and wasn’t particularly difficult.  If you listen to the outro of The Island Without a Name, when Rob starts singing “And I’ll be singing alone…”, there’s a tiny harmonic “woah”.  See if you can spot it.  I think it makes the song sound even better.

Subtle things like that were brought out a little as over the last couple of hours we were able to improve the mixing of the tracks.  This meant that we brought all of your comments and our thoughts about what we already had, what needed to be more prevalent and what needed to appear more in the background, and adjusted the volumes accordingly.  That sort of thing is actually more tiring because it requires intense concentration, and by the time 6pm rolled around, we were more than ready to head home.

But what came out of it was a set of tracks that are a lot closer to their final versions.  Keep your comments coming – this is really a vital time for your views to be heard, because we are due to return to the studio soon to perform the final mixing and at that point the tracks will be finished.

So get commenting!  Get over to the song pages, tweet us at http://twitter.com/robandkal, hit us up at our facebook fan group or even drop me an email at [email protected] – it doesn’t matter how you do it.  What matters is, your voice is heard.