[After that disappointing start with the click leaking everywhere, I placed a call to the studio on my way in the next morning (Tuesday) . "Tell me the click problem is sorted out" I begged Jeff, our engineer. To my delight he replied in the affirmative. And it did seem a lot better when we tracked the first song of the day. However when we came to the second song I could still hear unwanted metronome everywhere, so I resorted to my trick from the day before and swapped around the cue sends (there are 2 available in The Square) sending the cue with the metronome to the drummer via Cue 2. That seemed to do the trick.]
And this was really the start of the session proper. Everyone started to settle in nicely.
[We are tracking into ProTools, and next week at The Toyshop we will move everything over into Logic which is the DAW that Jack and I are most comfortable with....]
The band were focussed and diligent - we tracked 5 songs that day. Generally we worked from the rehearsal tapes using the tempo and the structures that we had worked on previously. However on a couple of songs I tweaked the tempo as it became clear that they were a bit sluggish when we were in the recording studio. Although we did edit on the slightly slower intro to one sped up song. On one song we changed the structure by adding another chorus to the end, which seemed to work really well.
[At the end of the session I set up Retrospect scripts so that everything would be automatically backed up every night to 2 seperate hard drives.]
We kept up the pace on Wednesday when we also tracked 5 songs. We all felt things were going well. We had a couple of visitors on Wednesday. Joe from Angular Records came by, and James (our assistant from Mute Studios) who was with me at the Horse and Groom gig also came by to pay his respects.
We had an interesting issue with one song where the band felt very strongly that different sections of the song needed to be different speeds, and after really trying to find one optimal speed for the whole song I had to agree. At first we tried playing the different parts of the song a different takes and test edited them together, but I found this musically stilted, so I asked the band to be patient for 10 minutes whilst we constructed a tempo map with ramped speeds between the different sections. This worked out to everyone's satisfaction.
On Thursday we had 2 more songs to track. The approach to one of these songs was very inspired by a "Shed" recording that Jack and George had done, where Jack had done a lot of drum editing and there were sections at about 4 different speeds. We optimized our version to 2 different speeds and Jack and worked with Ableton Live to tweak some of the shed beats so we cold import them into our session on different sections.
Then we listened to everything so far,
and realised there were 3 tunes we needed to retrack:One was the first song we had done and it just seemed a little out-of-focus (as well as having the second choice snare drum).
Another was simply too scrappy in the verses - Jack had done a programmed version of this verse that sounded really tight and tuff, he played that too me for the first time(!) to illluminate his vision, and George and I connected to it. This programmed version also had a 4's hat in the verses (instead of the 8's hat we were using) and I really liked the feel.
The third song we wanted to redo had Tom and George playing drums together and we felt we could gain focus and get a better sound if we overdubbed Tom's drums.
After retracking two of the songs it suddenly became clear to me that everyone was a bit tired. I called a halt to the session slightly earlier than usual, so we could re-convene, fresh, the next day.
On Friday the band went straight into the studio and played a really cool and focussed version of the final song. I wanted to hear the song with 2 different snare drums (one in the verse and one in the chorus). The band indulged me and it seemed to work very well. [By the way, Tom developed into a bit of a drum tuning hero on this session - he really enjoyed using a torque drum key that Jeff had brought to the session (my Drum Dial did not go down so well!) and purchased one himself, and he was always ready to tweak the drums for optimal sound.]
There was just a little more tracking to do. George really wanted to track one older song, so we quickly did that, and then Jack and George had been working on a beat that we tracked for future reference.
We also grabbed a bit of organ pedal bass on one track (the organ was sounding AMAZING)
We moved swiftly on to backing track editing and tidying up, somewhat ahead of schedule as this was originally planned for next week. Jeff doing an outstanding job as always.
Saturday we continued with editing but also did some extra drum recordings - there was one section of a song where we wanted more mics on Toms drums (those bottom tom mics are just sounding great!) so we had to record George and Tom separately again. Then Mark started the clearing up process.
