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

There are few things more annoying than a rattle when you’re recording. 
 
A sound that shouldn’t be there... well, shouldn’t be there. It’s even worse if you literally can’t put your finger on it. 
 
You go all round the room like a safe cracker with a stethoscope, listening intently to everything that could possible vibrate. Then you end up trying all sorts of positions, leaning on things to get them to be quiet.

Anyway, we managed to make the room as quiet as a mouse today, but Mat’s amp had other ideas. We’ve found that it likes to make a noise like an old fridge and no amount of pressing here, or applying pressure there, or for that matter swearing or kicking it seems to help.

Mat was buzzin'... but so was his amp.

It generally goes away after a while, so the solution we’ve come up with is to start it up really early then if it’s still being a fridge by the time we start recording, we record the louder tunes first. For tunes where the guitar isn’t as picky or exposed it tends to work fine.

To be fair, the amp has a lovely tone, so we forgive it for the stupid noises it likes to make. It’s also in its thirties now like us, and we also make stupid noises sometimes, particularly when getting into or up from an arm chair.

Anyway noises aside, today we managed to get the parts for four more tunes, so we’re gradually getting all the parts recorded. We’ll be recording guitars in Kate's office as well, so hopefully we should be done on that front really quite soon.

We managed to get a really good tone that suited quite a few of the songs. To make sure we can get the same sound again, Wes took a picture of our knobs... pa ha ha!

A picture of our knobs

No particular technical details today as we used the same setup as day 6. However, we’ll tell you once again about the lovely tent we made with some bed sheets and blankets. Had we any bed knobs and broomsticks we would have used those too.

As part of our drive to get a very clean guitar sound with no weird reverberation issues we’ve been enclosing the amp in a sort of box... today we went one better by gaffer-taping sheets to the walls and ceiling to make an attractive little tent structure.

Here’s a picture of it.

'The tent'... exactly like the one the Beatles didn't use.

It’s not so much cutting edge recording technology as a big blunt instrument... but it works. For the eagle eyed among you... ok, so we showed a picture of this in the previous post. But we're proud of it, so here it is again.

Here also, is a picture of Liam at the laptop... he's calibrating some phat audio tracks or something.

Liam does...some stuff...with...some things...

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 8 – three men and a shed’.