News about the Day 1

I always find the first day a bit frustrating - it always seem to take longer to set up than I would wish, everything seems to be going in slow motion. Of course there was quite a lot to set up (the smallish "Square" was pretty much stretched with all microphone cables being used, and most inputs on the desk) although it is a simple affair really, we just want too record the and as they play live, but there are quite a lot of sources and of course we like to capture a few weird and wonderful room microphones as well. Jeff (Engineer) and Mark (Assistant) did a great job and by mid afternoon we were ready to rock.

Drums were sounding good and bass was outstanding. The guitar was also big because we took an DI from Jack and ran that into an amp simulator, to get a tough dry sound as well as the psychedelic effected sound that comes from Jack's effects. The CS-1 seemed to be behaving, but we were having a few problems with the Yamaha sampler.

Then we hit the biggest problem of the day. In rehearsal George and I had pretty quickly established that it would be great to play most (if not all) of the tracks to a click, and although George has not had much experience playing to click he took to it very rapidly and seemed to be very capable and very pleased about playing with the electronic metronome. In the studio we could hear this click on everything though (and that's not the idea of course). This was rather irritating. However we pushed on to record a couple of tunes - I feel it is VERY important to get the band tracking as soon as possible in the session so they begin to get comfortable with the space, the atmosphere and the sound of the headphones.

However it rapidly became clear to everyone that the situation was intolerable, and Mark called the maintenance engineer to look at the problem first thing in the morning. We are running two cues and only the drummer's cue has the click in it. I had the idea of swapping the cues, just as we were leaving, and it seemed that Cue 2 was not radiating click everywhere, so we left the studio on a hopeful note.