Recording Part 1

Hello, so its been at least two months since the last post which is longer than usual but there really didn't seem like anything worth writing really. We played in Europe for a while which was fun although it felt a little more like we were playing to no one, but you cant win 'em all. Anyway we got to do some fun stuff like go sledging in a mountain village in Austria so all in all it was another good experience. Then we came back home and finished one last song, spent our Christmas and New Year working and seeing Family before arriving at Sandhill Studios in Liverpool to finally begin recording our second album....

Now its the end of day 4 and its late but we said that we'd do a sort of recording diary thing but its proving a bit difficult without internet access at the studio so my entries will probably be a bit sparrodic. We drive there every morning, set off at 10 get there by 11, then work until 11 or 12 at night and then come back home. So usually by the time we get home all we wanna do is go to bed! Even though all we're doing is sitting around and picking up our instruments every so often it can get quite intense and exhausting just being in one room for the whole day. Add to that the feeling of cabin fever as well (the studio is based sort of underground with no natural light). However things are going really well, you can see this by the look on Jims face

The way we're recording so far is by recording the Drums and Bass together live, making a solid and natural foundation for everything else to build on top of. Then recording the guitars and vocals after that, we've been managing about a song a day doing this. On the last album Rob recorded all the Drums parts for the songs one after the other in a block of about 4 days and then we added all the bass to the songs and then the guitars and then vocals. This meant that one person would be busy all the time for a few days and then not really have anything to do for the rest of the time recording and it meant Jim and Matt had to sing for days on end which really strained their voices. This time we've done all the parts to one song each day for 4 days, so that we'll all have something to do every day and also Jim and Matt and now Andy can rest their vocals for a little while between each song.

The other difference to this recording which is a slight change from the first album is the way in which we've decided to go with Drums and Bass playing live first. For the first album, we recorded everything completely separately but this time we really wanted to achieve more in the way of our live dynamic and get it sounding more live. We thought about recording totally live in a room together but for a few reasons we didnt do that. For one we knew that with some of the albums we've heard that are recorded live, they had an amazing feel but sounded a bit thin and weak and we wanted ours to still sound powerful but more 'live'. So we went for the inbetween option really, and its so far sounding exactly like we wanted it to. We've not gone over the top with using different amps and equipment but so far we've made selective choices about using amps and instruments that arent our own and its makes a subtle but great difference to the songs and enhances them while still sounding like us and the sound you hear live.

Anyway, that all I'll write for now. I'll see if I can get Jim to write out anything about the lyrical side of things and we'll get some more photos and possibly some videos of us too, and a few more points about how things are going as time goes on. We're making good progress so we might have some time to dick around in the studio and come up with some surprises (even surprises for us)

Till next time

Ciao x