Doubtful Sounds at Depot

Late last month, Matt & I went in to Depot Sound in Devonport to try recording in a real studio (rather than our front rooms or basements). There are some pictures up on the Doubtful Sounds Blog. So far, it seems to have gone well, but of course we've yet to hear the mixes.

Certainly having to nail eight or ten songs in a couple of days with a clock ticking is a very different experience to recording a single song over however many evenings it takes. I guess one advantage is simply that booking a studio forces us to try and record stuff.

How much better the recordings are compared with what we can do at home - what's a good balance between working at home vs in the studio - are things we still have to figure out.

Matt woz hair

So Matt (who still has hair, unlike, well me) came down on 11-12 August. We recorded something: I'm not sure what, yet, let's just say it Needs Work. In other news, well the Pop Album has been mastered; it needs to trimming, and cover art. Then we should feed it into the maw that is powertoolrecords.co.nz. Oh yeah: to get all this to go, the long-suffering mac was upgraded to 10.6.8, protools 9, and ELEVEN. Orange goodness.

Theme from the Doubtful Sounds

Matt & Richard were both around today, so we got to play with recording in the front room of Darkest Karori. We all got a bit acoustick - Matt & Richard on guitars, me on my trusty mando (that really does need new strings - if not an upgrade). Matt overdubbed bass (see if you notice, should sound out of place if you listen hard). Then, there is the first ever real video coming soon to you-tube near you: low-res goodness in an imitable style. After that things degenerated. Matt does look cool with the Rick (but then everybody does). And Richard got to unleash his inner guitar god. (Hmm, but we didn't record any of that. Duh).

November in Auckland

November, we went to Auckland. Another iteration. That's (almost) all I remember.

Made a bunch of two-track bounces of what Matt & I recorded. mostly surprising how bad the singing and mixing is. Have to do something about that. And I uploaded them to myspace, but I'm not telling where.

Recording with Matt

Matt came down for a couple of nights this week, and we used the time to start re-recording a batch of songs from the old Heybabies - stuff we'd recorded before but lots the masters for, or if we had them, well let's say they were demos but not really good enough.
Matt turned up with a list of two album's worth of songs (OK, three if you're happy with only 12-14 songs instead of 20 on each disc) and basically we started at the top and worked down. Got about five or so done - at least the bare bones - before Matt had to head back to Auckland.
Anyway, I have a big list of things to do, but at least some of them now relate to music!
And: given that there are something like 20 variants of "Hey Babies" and 4 or 5 "Doubtful Sounds" already on MySpace and Amplifier, we'll probably need a new name sooner or later.

Backups

And I even backed up! Aren't I good!

Preaching IV

So, gee, the thing about blogging is that you really have to keep posting, isn't it...

Anyway: the "Preaching" song is more or less finished. It took a while: 20th May for a rough mix which I lost when ProTools crashed (yay!); and then 27th when I managed to redo all that - luckily, I'd made some notes. Less finished because. well, it still sounds like something put together in a bedroom, which is of course precisely what it is. But there are lots of things that are more or less put together in bedrooms or lofts (Black Balloons by Jeremy Taylor; anything by Pine; Moth by Matthew Bannister) that still sound great. In fact, the simpler songs that I've done that are just voice & guitar sound much better than the more complex ones. I don't know why, but I think "mixing" and "mastering" must have something to do with it.

Preaching III

So, feeling kind of grotty this evening, large hangover-style headache due to not drinking anything at all today, it seems.

Spent a couple of hours working on mixing Preaching Jesus --- compressor squashing up the bass so you can actaully hear it, and working out which of the four vocal takes to keep (or rather which bits of which take). Still haven't programmed in the automation though (a job for tomorrow), and hopefully I'll manage to finish the drum programming too.

And that will be enough for just a rough mix: how long would doing a really serious job take?

The Well of the Saints

Well I've made good to my public (and by other public) --- all two blog readers, by finishing up another song. Yeah it's late, but I'm on leave tomorrow (so that I can be here to take delivery of Small Person's new bunkbeds) so hopefully it's not to bad. Oh yeah, I've somehow got to read seven papers too (while on leave, yep) but hopefully that won't be too grim.

Anyway, yes, another new - or rather old - song dating from years and years ago: at least before 2000, perhaps before 1995? About 3:30 long, which would be perfect for a pop song, except that it's not really a pop song - another mournful piece about, well, the usual mix of faithlessness, ennui, and desperation.

I think The Well of the Saints is a beautiful title for a song. Uncle Google and Mad Aunt Wikipedia tell me that it's the title of a early 20th century Irish play: but this song has nothing whatsoever to do with the play except the title, as far as I'm aware. Although reading the synopsis, well both seem more or less depressing, or at least melancholy.

So, that makes something like 8 songs now, of which at least 6 are in the slow, guitar driven style, relatively consistent, with a couple of outliers (children with rather more bass than is good for it, and the colonel, which turned into a rattling dunedin thing, somehow).

Enough for an EP (gulp!)

Forever Tuesday Evening

Today I started the new regime of heading downstairs on tuesday evenings starting at 7pm. I don't have to worry about Small Person, I'm not supposed to go to work, just play with music stuff.

Or in today's case, I spent most of the time fighting protools - loading new versions of Multimedia demo plugins: the US based site seemed to have rate-limiting so I couldn't access the site when downloading something, couldn't download in parallel, so that plus OS upgrades plus trying to get Reason Adapted to run all took hours. Turns out I still have a bunch of Protools plug-ins to upgrade by calling customer support, and Reason 2.5 simply won't work with Protools 7, I either have to upgrade Reason - or settle for using Live, which was my original plan. Or - record tracks in Reason standalone, then bring them into Protools, which would be another option.

Finally, after going for about three hours, decided to cut to the chase with the second song on the four-track, The Fire. Again, crap guitars recorded years ago, bleak lyrics. Couldn't be arsed trying to redo it from scratch, as I like the generally noisy feel of the track, so ran a stereo mix of the tape deck, then added in noise with the extra famous Mastererizer, sprinkling of reverb and compression and that's another take.

The big problem is what comes next: I though I had five or six things on the four-track, but really there was only Lazarus and The Fire. So its either back to the notebooks for more songs for Sinner; mixing or re-recording existing Hey Babies tracks (not sure I can face that yet) or something new. Most likely something for Sinner from a notebook, I think.