Time-aligning drums, home-made boxes and the apocalypse

Day 3, and we're finally moving on from drums and on to things that make tunes...like bass, and bit-crushed power synths.

Dan (shown on left surrounded by computers and gizmos) is currently adding some fairly monstrous-sounding synths to the intro of 'Reaction'.

Normally he plays these live as well as his bass, which has given rise to the need for some nice home-made boxes.

Here on the left is his sustain pedal which once clicked keeps whatever chord / noise he's last been playing carrying on, until it's clicked again, which allows him to add a bass part in underneath.

Ingenious and yet very simple and effective!

In their tendency towards building their own rather than buying one, I'm certainly finding some common ground with these guys, and its refreshing to see their quality gear used alongside home-made stuff so fearlessly.

I haven't heard this one yet, but I'm told it basically sounds like the apocalypse.

















Anyhow, we thanked Dickie for his final contributions to the tracks this afternoon as he rounded off his drum takes to 'Reaction'. There was plenty of time-aligning involved and various swapping of snares/kicks (both real and programmed) in getting the tracks ready to be worked on, but we're ploughing on full-steam ahead and things are beginning to come to life!

Might even post a sneak preview tomorrow, once we have something resembling a sound!

Chris

Brokenfor day 2: The Winner

Workshopping 'The Winner' with Brokenfor...

Brokenfor day 1

 We're with Norwich-based band Brokenfor for the next two weeks recording their new EP. Today has mostly been about workshopping the tunes, listening to various references to get some goals in our head and rigging drums for some initial takes.

As is often the case with new projects, things got off to a fairly leisurely start. Drums, keyboards, home-made pedals, computers slowly emerged from the pile of cases in the amp room as the band made ready to give us a tour of the four songs they're going to be working with us on.


After hearing these, and then discussing a whole bunch of references and influences to draw upon, we went back to work on the first song - A+B Chemistry.

Work-shopping can be a wildly different process depending on the band. It can be everything from writing a completely fresh idea with an artist to looping a virtually finished song until that chorus fill is absolutely spot-on.

With these guys, their creativity and vision is spot-on, so it's more just a case of making sure that it's being realised as fully as possible. So we were trying out various different combinations of instruments for transition sections, plugging one or two holes, and creating one or two new ones, tidying up various rhythmic things and generally just rinsing through the changes so every little nuance of the song was firmly entrenched in our heads.

After about an hour or so of this, we set to work with Dickie, laying down the drum takes.

Here's what happened next...

        

Busy Times!

April is pretty stacked with things going on! First up, our horribly depressing (yet amazing) album 'Frozen Dust' is progressing nicely. We welcomed some beautiful singers to Purple Squares over the past couple of weeks to sing on several of the tunes. Nishma, Capucine and Andy did marvellous jobs and thoroughly ramped up the general greatness of the record. I love that making music brings people together, and these sessions again reminded me of this - we had lots of laughs, as the appalling and thankfully as-yet unseen video footage testifies!

Looking ahead, I'm very excited about Brokenfor coming to record with us. Also, at long last we're getting back to work on Tommy Eye's new album, which I cannot say enough good things about. I'm positively bursting with good things to say about it. 'Unfinished' is the only negative word I can honestly associate with it at this point.

Other recent shinnanigans include mastering a mixtape for The Growth, writing and producing with Ebonie G, and secret talks with important people about future projects I can't possibly say anything about at this point.

Chris