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

Today we took the first step into unknown territory.

Well, not really unknown, it’s round the corner from where we live... but it was a departure from what we’ve been doing so far.

Up to now we’ve been recording in a fancy studio with an engineer, nice soundproofing, expensive baubles and high quality crisps.For the next few days we’ll be blazing a new trail as we record the electric guitars ourselves.
 
For the last year or so, Liam’s been amassing hardware faster than North Korea. Like them, he’ll only be using it for peaceful purposes, but you’ll find a list of what he’s got and what we’re using in the technical info bit at the bottom of today’s post.

Before we could get going on the electric parts, Mat’s guitar needed a bit of a set-up as it’s intonation was not altogether convincing. It’s a great sounding guitar, but it was dropping out of tune a little on some of the louder parts, so we needed to sort that out.

Mat's guitar... could be before or after the set-up...
...impossible to tell...

We’ve had it thoroughly overhauled now as well as his amp, which was making a noise a bit like a fridge. This has now also been fixed.

We’ve decided to approach getting the guitar parts in a few different locations, for different sounds, but we’ll also be taking a DI on each occasion. That’ll give us the freedom to make it sound like we recorded it in Notre Dame cathedral if we want to, later in the development of the record.

Mat's amp... with some microphones that Liam knows about.

Today we’re not recording in Notre Dame though. No, we’ve been recording in the live room of Antenna, Crystal Palace, which is where we normally rehearse. In order to get a nice solid sound without it bouncing around all over the place, we constructed a sort of ... box... thing... around the amp, using some ...large box-around-an-amp boards.

We then draped a large blanket over the top, which made the whole thing look like the sort of ‘base’ or ‘den’ you make when you’re a kid. We used to make them on building sites which is dangerous and shouldn’t be encouraged.

If you build it... it might stay up for a bit...

We didn’t box it in too much, because it would sound like we recorded it in a phone booth. But we made sure that it was effectively isolated from any odd surfaces in the room and away from any nasty unwanted reverberation.

Progress was gradual today, but good. We had to figure out how we’re going to approach this, and decide where things need to go in the room to get the sound we want. For the next few weeks we’ll be working for three-hour sessions, so we won’t be coming out with 20 parts each time.

We got four tunes today though, which is really good going, given that we took up a lot of the time working out what goes where.

Over the next two weeks or so we’ll be doing more electric parts, aiming to get them all in the can by the end of August.

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.

Next up - ‘Day 7 – when I find out what’s rattling I’m going to kick its head in’.

Technical notes from Liam

Electric Guitars

There's about 3 million ways to record electric guitars, but in the name of sanity we've narrowed it down to just a few thousand for this record.

For our first session we kept it simple and used a single SM57 a couple of inches from one of the speakers on Mat's Fender amp, adjusting position for tone. Everything's going through an M-Audio interface into Cubase.

Depending on the song, and the recording space, we'll also be combining with a Rode K2 condenser at various distances. Where necessary we'll be taking a DI feed too, so we can try re-amping certain parts in larger rooms.