We spent yesterday in the recording studio and laid down five tracks.
Thanks to Andy at RMS studios for helping make it a productive day.
It’s our first time in a proper studio. Earlier recordings – including our cd – have been diy affairs. And while we were pleased with those, it was so much easier using a proper studio with great acoustics, good equipment – including microphones well outside our budget, and someone else operating the controls with both good ears and years of experience at getting good recordings.
It also meant that we were able to play as live. In the past we have always had to record the rhythm section first and then add horns and vocals as overdubs. But yesterday we were able to get down Latin goes Ska, all playing together, on the second take at the end of the day when we were running out of time.
The tracks we recorded were:
The Tide is High
Tainted Love
Paranoid
Dr Who
Latin goes Ska
Now comes the slower job of mixing and mastering, but another advantage of having a great recording to start with is that this is much easier than with less upmarket equipment.
We also have some video, though that was a lower priority, and hope to have enough to put together one of us playing Tainted Love.
Here’s our version of 99 Red Balloons in one of our series of dodgy live recordings.
There’s the usual warning. There’s a single recorder at the side of the stage – and it’s consequently rather unbalanced, a strange mix of direct and sound via the PA, and comes complete with audience noise.
Here are a couple more live recordings from the last wedding gig we played.
Once again they come with a warning. They are lo-fi and unbalanced as the recorder was off to one side of the stage. We’ve done some surgery to reduce the bass (as the bass amp was near the recorder), but it’s impossible to bring up the guitar. which was the other side of the stage.
Here are a couple of tracks we played at the recent wedding gig in Rotherhithe.
They were recorded from one side of the stage, so the sound is very unbalanced. It is easy to tell the guitar was on the other side of the stage, and the bass on the same side as the recorder.
There is also a lot of audience noise (though they seem prertty happy).
But we hope they show that we can play this stuff live too.
While it keeps the same design (more or less), we have completely overhauled our website. And to launch it we are proud to release our latest demo recording – our version of the 60s ska classic – My Boy Lollipop.
Or you can listen to it together with some of our other tunes on our soundcloud page.
Techies might like to know that we now have almost everything in a self-hosted WordPress installation. There are a few snags with moving the site in this way. Some older posts have lost their photos for example, but we think almost everything else works as it should.
It’s taken rather more time than we expected but we are now able to begin reveal the fruits of our recording sessions earlier in the year.
Here therefore is our version of Kylie’s Can’t Get Out of my Head.
As can be seen, the video was shot during the various recording sessions for this number.
We started by recording the drums and guitar (with bass and vocal guide tracks). Over those we recorded the bass, keyboards and vocals at separate sessions, finishing with the horns.
You may wonder why the horns are surrounded by duvets. This is simply to dampen some of the room reverb, and stop it sounding boxy.
It’s the first time we’ve shot and edited video so we have had to learn this skill as we went along. If we knew then, what we knew now it would probably be much better. And no-one warned us just how long it takes to edit a video.
