Day 5...’Nearly... hang on I’ve nearly got it... what was it? Hang on... shit’.

After Kate’s mammoth pianothon yesterday, day five presented us with a choice.
As the last day of the five we booked, and our last in Ascape studios until later in the year, the choice for day five was:

a) record all the acoustic guitar parts
b) record all the electric guitar parts 

We’ll need to do parts for 20 tunes for both instruments, so even if we drank lots of caffeine again there’s no way that’s one day’s work.

We decided to go with getting all the acoustic parts done. For one thing they’re a bit closer to being finished, while we’re still figuring out some of the electric parts. 

It was also a great opportunity to use the room we’ve been working in. It’s a nice, open, woody-sounding room, so it seemed a shame not to use it for the acoustic guitars, not to mention their very good, very expensive microphones.

Liam decides which instrument to record
 using the traditional drum of decisions

Finally, Mat had driven across London in heavy traffic a couple of days before to pick up the Martin guitar we hired. If we hadn’t used it he would have cried.

Doing the acoustic guitar parts meant that Mat, both Liams and Wes all had a go in the live room. Playing a good guitar in a nice room, through such a pretty-sounding microphone is a great experience. It sounds fantastic and it’s fun to play.

The downside is that of all the instruments featured in these first few days, the acoustic probably has the greatest frustration factor. It’s very easy to make it go ‘boing’ ‘squeak’ and ‘buzz’... none of which are desirable sounds.

We had a full day to do it though, and once more thanks to being really practiced up we managed to get all 20 songs, mostly in 1-2 takes. That gave us time to go back and get the fiddly bits that can sometimes ruin a whole take.

Wes demonstrates the electric guitar but ultimately accepts
that today is all about getting the acoustic parts

We did most of them to a click for exactly this reason. It’s always nice to get full takes from start to finish, but with the acoustic it’s a bit like the infinite monkey theorem... you could get a beautiful 97% perfect take then cock it up irreparably at an important bit. You could then proceed to get it almost right for the next ten thousand years.

Therein lies the beauty of dropping in. It means you have to listen to ‘Wait a min... nearly, hang on, nearly got it... shit... hang on... nearly, one more...damn. Wait a second...’ for a while, or even be the person saying it... but that’s unavoidable.

You get there in the end and we got everything we needed. Importantly, it all sounds great.

Next week we’ll be moving on to getting the electric guitars done. We’re confident we can record these ourselves in a variety of inexpensive locations, so we’re going to experiment with those a bit more.

Cheers Nick! (That's Nick at the desk)

It’s been a great first five days in Ascape... we’ll be back again later in the year to get the vocals. In the meantime we’re cracking on with the rest of the album gorilla style.
That’s not a typo. We’ll be dressed as gorillas. It helps.

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 6 – riffing in a box, riffing in a hardboard box.


Technical notes from Liam
Pretty straightforward today...Nick used two Beyer M160 ribbon mic's in a sort of XY configuration, at various distances from the sound-hole depending on the tune.

(There'll be more to say once we get to the electric parts!)