Several moons ago, the ever industrious Mr Stovold entered Brassneck into a competition he spied in the back pages of the NME to win a day’s recording in a swanky studio. Our demo of ‘Set My Alarm For 7’ was duly submitted and, guess what? We won. Huzzah!
The studio, Soundscape, is owned by the RNIB and situated in their site at Redhill, Surrey, and its primary use is to provide the sight-impaired residents with access to recording and other musical facilities. After much to-ing and fro-ing and a last minute weekend date cancellation (by the studio!) we fix on splitting the session over two Monday evenings.
When I arrive, just after 6pm, Sid, Kat and Mark are already there, the drums are set and miked up ready to go. Good progress! St. John, who runs the facility, and another Mark, a freelance engineer, appear busy. I have a snoop around and it looks like an impressive setup. Loads of space, a massive desk in the control room and an adjoining room full of assorted percussion, including a large gong. I couldn’t resist a quick J. Arthur Rank. (Er, no – you know full well that’s not what I mean – it wasn’t that exciting.)
We’re here to record one of our new-ish songs, ‘Too Much, Too Drunk’. It’s a snappy little Stax soul-inspired number (with a ska middle eight – it works, honest!), which is rhythmically quite hard to nail accurately. We know from experience that the best way to capture it is for Mark to record the drums to a click track, without the distraction of everybody else’s dodgy timing, then overdub the other instruments. However, the studio guys are insistent that we record it pretty much ‘as live’. We decide to humour them. Funnily enough, as it happens we’re right, and after several unsatisfactory attempts they’re convinced to do it our way.
Within a few takes, our Mark has pretty much got the drums down. The raw sound of the kit records very well and sounds great. Obviously there's some sonic tweaking to do before they sound quite right. Obviously to us, that is – Mark Engineer and St. John seem strangely reluctant to use the software at their disposal to tame that raw sound and get it into an fit state for the track. Fair enough, maybe they're going to do that later, we think. Think again!
Next up is the bass. A seemingly endless amount of time is spent messing around with mics to capture the sound of the bass amp. I start to wonder – are these guys just perfectionists, or is there a possibility that they don't quite know what they're doing...? I get a good take with a minor fluff in the second half, so I ask them if I can drop a bit in. That should be easy, now shouldn't it? Apparently not. They spend at least half an hour trying to figure out how to do this while I sit and twiddle my thumbs and the rest of the band get increasingly restless. It's now apparent that they haven't got a clue how to use the recording software. Er, aren't they supposed to know this? Well, bizarrely it turns out that they don't! Engineer Mark says he knows Cubase, but not Logic, and St. John doesn't know his way around it either!
Of course, we should have realised there's no such thing as a free lunch, and it's now clear that the only reason we're getting this session free of charge is that we're being used as guinea pigs to test out the studio and recording setup, presumably so the guys here can get up to speed with a view to charging for future sessions. This is all very well, but it's an incredibly frustrating experience, the clock is ticking and our studio time is rapidly disappearing round the U-bend. If we don't come away from this session with something usable, we'll be mightily pissed off, having traipsed across the south of England and spent hours waiting around which could have been used more productively.
Anyhow, eventually we get the bass down, although it's impossible to tell if it's any good, as all we can hear in the playback is a low rumbling sound somewhere underneath the crashing drums. There's obviously no way we're going to come away from here with any kind of mix.
Fortunately, I have Logic Pro at home, so we decide that we should just get everything we can recorded and then finish off and mix it in our own time. Once we decide this the process becomes slightly less painful. But only slightly, mind. Once we've got the electric guitar recorded, it's gone 11pm, so we call it a night.
In the intervening couple of weeks before the second half of the session, I put in some time cleaning up the recording and doing a preliminary mix of what we've got, ready for the second half.
Fortunately, by the time we return the studio guys seem to have got a little more au fait with the software. And it has to be said, Engineer Mark does know what he's doing when it comes to mics and capturing the raw sound. The violin parts and vocals are duly recorded, then Ben lays down a killer piano part and a bit of organ in the middle eight. Call me old-fashioned, but me, I love a bit of organ in the middle eight. By the time we're finished, there's no time to do any kind of mixing at the studio anyway. That's quite a relief – I don't think we could have endured that, to be honest. We download all the files and get the Hell outta there.
As it happens, we're still working on 'Too Much, Too Drunk'. When you get to hear it in the not-too-distant, I hope you'll think of the pain that went into its creation. You have to suffer for your art, don't you?
Neil
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