ComEnts

location: bleeding ear studios, Reading

Saturday 19th Feb 2005

It was midday when Müf arrived en masse at Bleeding Ear Studios. We had 2 days to record 4 tracks. This is going to be a bit of a recording diary, might be a bit too much detail for those who've recorded before but hey! Day one the aim was to do the bass and drum tracks, we only had the drummer for one day so needed to get it all down. Still, we've had until about 5pm when Rob (who's recording us) was heading into London to see Three Litre.

First impressions of Bleeding Ear were that it's changed a hell of a lot since Sonic Undermind recorded there. We were one of the first bands he had in... well he was in the band! Since then it's improved massively. Rob's now got a new pro-tools rig to record on and there's a live room for the drums, or sticking the cranked up guitar cabs in.

Getting the drum tracks down involved basically setting up the drums in the drum room, micing them all up and making them sound nice - which led to some artistic debates about what drums should sound like between Rob (who's also a drummer himself) and our drummer Iain. "Don't fight the drums!" We got there in the end though and the drums sound amazing. I've made that sound really easy but that entire process probably took an hour.

To help get the feel of the tracks Sam, AK and I played guide guitars for the songs in the control room (Iain could hear us through his headphones in the drum room). It was all relatively straightforward. Couple of takes for each song and it was done. In fact it went so well the guide bass was actually good enough to keep on two of the songs. Then we re-recorded the bass for two songs that needed redoing and we were done for the day!


Sunday 20th Feb 2005

Sunday was guitars and vocals day, so only AK and me were needed. We got there on time, got set up, all ready to go and DISASTER! AK's amp blew up! Ok, it didn't so much blow up as just stop working really quietly and unimpressively.

Where do you find a replacement Marshall at midday on a Sunday? Luckily we managed to get hold of Steve from Rebus who had a very similar amp. He said we could use his amp but he was on the train on the way back from Leeds. D'oh. He suggested we see if Alex from Rebus could pop round his house and pick it up for him. Which we did and he did! Total life saver. In the end with all the ringing round we'd done and heading up to Wokingham to meet Alex and get the amp we only lost about an hours recording time.

So, back to Bleeding-Ear and we crashed back into it. Recorded the distorted guitar for all the tracks then did the clean channels. Rob experimented with some distant micing on the guitar which sounded absolutely great for one of my distorted channels. I think I'm getting used to recording now, this time it was relatively painless. I got really good takes first time for a lot of it and with feeling! After the initial "argh, no amp!!!" stress it was a really nice day.

Last thing to go on was vocals, we only had time to do the vocals for two songs because of our lost hour but the two we had sound amazing, I didn't know Alex could sing that well to be honest.

I can't wait to hear the finished result. In the studio it was all sounding better than I ever thought it would!