Producing an LP for "These New Puritans"

A Few Final Words

2007-08-15T08:55:00.001Z

The mixing went really well at Metropolis - once again we used the power of "in-the-box" to revisit and tweak almost all of the mixes in the very last couple of days. I have uploaded some more photos of Tom and Jack hard at work on the last day of the session. (In fact there was one more day when James printed all the instrumentals, just in case they are needed, but the band and I didn't attend for that).

Jack worked very hard on the running order (and even left off one of the songs I really wanted to include - but hey, it's not my record!) and Simon Heyworth did a great job mastering for us.

Thanks to the band for asking me to make this record with them. It was a please and a privilege, and I am very happy with the fruits of our labour.

Also thanks to the rest of the studio team, our fantastic engineer Jeff Knowler and our two great assistants, Mark Allaway (Miloco) and James Aparicio (Metropolis).

In fact the thanks list goes on and on. The record is the result of an almost unimaginably huge network of people, manufacturers, farmers, software designers, lorry drivers, business people, supermarket owners, steel mill workers, miners, artists, shoe store sales people....... The list really goes on and on. I can't even count the people who enable me to eat breakfast. It's all teamwork.

Thanks everyone.

Specialized Power

2007-06-17T17:47:00.000Z

I complement the Brompton with another bike, pictured here outside the mixing room:

JB at the controls

2007-06-17T17:43:00.000Z

Yesterday we worked on one of the newest songs - the vocal idea was not quite sorted out so Jack took over the controls for a bit of vocal editing. Now it's all working pretty well, and will be finished tomorrow.

Recap:

2007-06-17T00:31:00.001Z

So I got a bit behind with the Blog - the last 2 posts were all from the Toyshop second session which was done I think the week starting April 30th. Right now we are at Metropolis Studio, mixing. We have a first mix of almost every song and next week we move on to mix tweaks. Generally sounding very good, though I say so myself.

My Noisy G5 at The Toyshop

2007-06-17T00:21:00.000Z

a brief description of the problem

Second tracking session at The Toyshop - some pix

2007-06-17T00:00:00.000Z

Jeff pretending he can use Logic (he is a Pro Tools guy):

Sophie, our very helpful and considerate Studio Manager:

Jack very impressed by Gareth's skills at the controls :-)

George and Tom numbering limited editions of Navigate:

Hardcore Mix Team

2007-06-15T16:35:00.001Z

Jack transferring files

2007-06-15T16:29:00.001Z

Mixing at Metropolis Studios

2007-06-15T16:22:00.000Z

Mixing Started at Metropolis Studios on June 6

Just a quick note to say that yesterday we were mixing a song called MKK which has a reference to Michael Barrymore in it.

All of us back in The Toyshop

2007-05-03T12:40:00.000Z

After 3 weeks apart I am back with TNP working on overdubs for the album at the legendary Toyshop:

Jack has done a lot of work on the tunes on his laptop (rockin' with his new Fireface 400) and come back with some great beats and guitar work, but absolutely no vocals :-).

So our focus for the second half of this session is to get lots of the vocals recorded. As I type Jack is doing a great job with "Numerology". He is in the booth singing into a Neumann M149, going into my UA 6176. This microphone seemed to help with intelligibility.

Gig at Islington Academy cancelled

2007-04-28T00:14:00.000Z

So I arrived at about 23:20 for the TNP gig this evening and heard from Sophie that the gig was canceled - George had injured himself getting onto the stage.

Everyone was a bit shocked, but the injury is not life threatening, although it has messed his hair up.

After George left for hospital
the rest of the band packed up and left. I asked Tom what happened:

and then we said our goodbyes.

Back in the Studio on Monday.

Life changing events :-)

2007-03-26T23:54:00.000Z

Everything now being moved to Logic

2007-03-26T23:41:00.000Z

I took my rig to The Toyshop and as we complete backing track edits I set up Logic Songs for Jack and I to work on.......

I think Tom took this pic of me working:

First Day at The Toyshop

2007-03-26T23:39:00.000Z

Very exciting first day at The Toyshop - we set up 2 rooms. Jeff is editing in one room and I am taking ideas and overdubs from the band in the other room. They wanted to sample a Barbecue that they found on the roof:

The Square Session finishes.......

2007-03-25T13:57:00.000Z

Me, bridging the Analog and Digital Worlds

2007-03-25T13:48:00.000Z

A bit more detail about the recordings

2007-03-25T12:01:00.000Z

[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.

Guitar Power

2007-03-23T22:41:00.000Z

Day 4 - listening back

2007-03-23T10:52:00.000Z

A few pics of Day 3 recording

2007-03-23T01:18:00.000Z

At Flickr

Day 3: Another great tracking session

2007-03-23T00:27:00.000Z

Brompton Power

2007-03-22T22:24:00.000Z

I ride a Brompton and Jeff, our engineer, rides a Brompton too.

4 of my £s

2007-03-22T22:20:00.000Z

Some Pix of the band in Rehearsal

2007-03-21T09:25:00.000Z

These pix were taken in Vampire Music in Deptford Bridge when we were rehearsing and doing preproduction for the recording session

It's Magic

2007-03-21T08:55:00.001Z

Pix from Day 2

2007-03-20T23:58:00.000Z

pix at flickr

News about the Day 1

2007-03-20T23:29:00.000Z

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.

The Band perform a backing track

2007-03-20T23:27:00.000Z

A quick check on the mood of the session after Day 1

2007-03-20T23:20:00.000Z

The Studio is prepared

2007-03-20T08:47:00.000Z

Stuff that happened earlier

2007-03-20T08:09:00.001Z

Back on February 8, on a snowy morning, Jack and Tom and I went to Miloco, so I could show them "The Square" and "The Toyshop" which I felt would be suitable places for us to work:

I also heard gigs at Barfly (Feb 17), Horse and Groom (March 7) (photos), and Durr (Feb 26), all of which I recorded (sometimes badly with inappropriate use of AGC) on my Roland Edirol 09, which I am finding to be a really great tool. These recordings were posted to private pages for me and the band to listen to, along with room recordings of the rehearsal sessions we had together at Vampire in Deptford.

A Look Around:

We enjoyed coffee and sandwiches at Café des Amis, just outside on New Cross Road.

Introduction

2007-02-01T22:55:00.000Z

Laurence at Domino introduced me to Joe at Angular Records, and to "These New Puritans" late last year. I caught one (very exciting) gig in Shoreditch and then had a meeting with Jack and Tom a week or so later where we talked about ways of working. As a result we decided to get together on their new album, with me producing. Originally we planned to start together at the end of January, but Jack has been busy in Paris writing an extended piece for Dior, so that has held things up a bit. Anyway Jack came back on Jan 31 and we had a first planning meeting with Joe at the Office (ARC 019). Obviously everyone wants to spend the budget in the most effective way, and we honed a plan where we have studio time together separated by periods when Jack and the band will work on the material without me.