Day 8 - 'Three men and a shed'

Not the rumoured late sequel to the Tom Selleck film… no.

Three men in a shed because Kate and Liam C are off on holiday and Louise is in South America doing a massive trip… possibly with peyote.

The sh... office.

Also, it’s not really a shed… it’s an office. In fact it’s Kate’s office where she teaches people who can’t sing how to sing, and people who can sing to sing better. It’s affectionately known as ‘The Shed’ though, like 30 St. Mary Axe is known as The Gherkin, or 124 Randor Avenue is known as Castle Grayskull… you get the idea.

Anyway, shed or office, why are we in it? Well, today we rounded off the guitars by recording Mat’s parts for a whopping nine tunes. Having finally got his amp to stop making fridge noises, amp, guitar and guitarist were all on fine form so we rattled through lots of tunes.

 

Mat - before getting down to business - note, no glasses.

It was also a lovely day, as you can see from the photos. We had Mat in the office doing his thing. He was wearing his glasses too, which shows that he was concentrating hard. He only wears them when he means business. Meantime, Liam and Wes enjoyed the sunshine outside. Then we all went for beers at the Grape and Grain.

 

Liam pulling the face that chronologically fits between
'it's not working' and 'it's working'.

 

Incidentally, we all got slightly bollocked by Kate for leaving the office in a bit of a mess, but that’s another story…or possibly another diary entry.

Technical info from Liam is the same as the guitar sessions at Antenna – just that there was no need to build tents out of bits and pieces today. The room itself sounded pretty good, kind of woody and nice. Dropped the info in anyway, for people who like microphones.



Enjoying the sunshine - Wes is actually listening to Slayer here.

 

So, work is cracking along nicely… that’s all the drums, bass guitars and piano parts done. There’ll be Liam’s acoustic parts later on as well as vocals, but over the next few sessions we’ll be concentrating on cellos.

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 9 – There’s always room for cello’.

Technical notes from Liam

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.

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.