One of the great things about celebrated soprano, pianist and voice coach Kate Proudlove of The Peryls is that she normally doesn’t need to retake stuff. Not much anyway, it’s usually a 1-2 take affair.
It’s all to do with yoga or pilates or mental conditioning or something. She’s been known to play some of her parts in a dark room wearing a blindfold, using only the force to guide her away from the bum notes.
But the other great thing about Kate is she’s happy to sit in a room by herself on a different floor of the building, communicating intermittently with five blokes she can’t see, over a microphone.
Today was all about the piano... Nick took it to pieces so we could record it guts first... it looked very arty and sounded, to be fair, brilliant. They’d just had it tuned so everything sounded sparkly and most importantly, in tune.
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| Piano guts |
Kate’s task for the day was to sit and bash out all of the piano parts one by one (doing them all at the same time would have sounded horrible). The parts ranged from completely written and rehearsed, through almost there, to completely making them up there and then.
We started at 10am and it went right to the line, with Kate plinking the final plonk a couple of minutes before 6pm.
That’s everything, all of them – all 20 parts... which is a great feeling to come away from the studio with.
The rest of us hung around in the control room with Nick, making comments on which takes to use, which parts to watch out for and how much we were enjoying the stash of goodies that we seemed to have kept in the room with us.
Ah well, we gave Kate a banana and a Pringle when she got out, she seemed to feel better after that.
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| Kate at the Piano... in this reconstruction, Kate is played by Liam S |
Tomorrow we’ve decided to set up the acoustic guitar and get those parts done. Since we’ve got the benefit of a nice woody sounding room, and a very nice Martin, that’ll be the best use of Day 5.
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| A blue Kiwi - see Liam's technical notes below... |
Don't forget you can view all the photos of the sessions by Nicolai Amter here.
You can also watch a short video of us dicking about.
Look out for ‘Day 5...’Nearly... hang on I’ve nearly got it... what was it? Hang on... shit’.
Technical info from Liam
Once we'd tracked drums and bass, we moved onto piano for an epic 20-song session, in which Katie's fingers were reduced to rubble!
The piano lid and the bit at the front were taken off to expose the strings and assorted gubbins. These were miked on either side with a spaced pair of Blue Kiwi's.
The piano was newly tuned so it sounded great and we used a large woody room downstairs to get a bit of space going on.
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