Although I don't think this recording was the same standard as the Live & Direct recording, it has a great 'live' sound! We recorded four tracks with Tony, and it was great fun (considering most of it was done 'under the influence'). It was recorded on an 8-track desk in a small shed, but the results wouldn't show this. The drums were put down first, followed by the bass, then the rythem guitar and lastly Charlie with the lead! You'll have to have a listen to the songs and see what you think!
The Live+Direct Recording
Well, this is certainly by far the best recording that we've done so far. We did the actual playing at the ACM in Guildford, and we had four hours to put down two tracks - Raising the Stakes and Grace. We played the music for both tracks first, using our own amps, and the drum kit provided, which Jack tells me was very good, especially the snare apparently. Anyway, we did Raising the Stakes first, and had a couple of tries at doing all the rhythm guitaring, bass and drums together; we eventually took the first take, and then moved on to touch up a bit of the bass playing. We had to do all of the heavy guitaring separately, because of a lack of headphones (really - I don't understand either, but that's what we were told), and so we did that next. After this we did the lead guitaring, with the solo certainly taking a few attempts, but pretty good in the end. After we'd got that sorted, we did Grace. All the guitaring etc. went down pretty much first time, with a couple of things redone. Anyway, we then moved on to the singing - Oli took a few takes to do the singing for Raising the Stakes, but once he was warmed up, he was fine. Running out of time for the singing on Grace, I didn't do a particularly good job, but more on that later. Anyway, we were really up for the mixing when it came around, and Mike and Oli went off to get it sorted, or so we thought. Anyway, this was a bit of a nightmare, because it turned out that Clive - the recording dude from the ACM had done it wrong or formatted it wrong, or something else entirely incompetent, and we thought that we might even have lost the recording itself. Anyway, we took it to Opus studios again a while later, and they managed to get it sorted. Sam who had just joined as a singer, came and stormed the vocals on Grace, with a bit of backing by yours truly. Anyway, Mike and Oli did all of the difficult bits, and we came away with a really stunning quality recording. It shuld be on MP3.com very soon - watch this space.
Farnham Park Festival
Saturday 28/7/2001
Live+Direct Free Concert.It was pretty awesome and we were mixed live, and they took a copy on minidisc. Now, since Sam has run off with the minidisc and then buggered off to Spain for a few weeks (the cheek of it), we won't be able to get this recording properly sorted for a little while yet, I'm sorry to say. Anyway, when we do, it should be a good quality live recording of us.
Other Recordings
On top of these, we've also done a whole load on a 4-track tape recorder we have, but they never come out particularly well, because unfortunately, we're not very good at using it. Either way, it's all good experience. Look out very soon, for a new set of recordings that we're hopefully going to be able to do very soon... Watch here for more details.
