If you so please, you can check out some footage from our recording session here
It’s also on the myspace profile
I’ll try and get some more footage up as soon as I can
Greetings from the Hollywood Hills. We are in the US to record our second album with a producer called Brad Wood . We spent many a month and many a conference call, sifting through a number of potential producers and engineers. Brad came out on top. The Studio is in the back garden of his house in the San Fernando Valley, set on an idyllic street in suburban Los Angeles. He has built a studio control room in his guesthouse and a separate live recording room about 10 feet away, all nice and cosy.
THE STUDIO CONTROL ROOM THE STUDIO LIVE ROOM
We are staying at an apartment complex called ‘the Oakwood’, about 10 minutes drive from the studio. It is a peculiar place, filled with aspiring actors, general ‘entertainment’ workers and child stars with their pushy parents. September is apparently pilot season in LA, so actors are in town for auditions. For trivia fans out there, it is where Nirvana stayed when they were recording ‘Nevermind’, and where ‘superfreak’, Rick James died http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75qXUfp4wtw.
THE OAKWOOD APARTMENTS
We soon realised that getting taxis back and forth to the studio wouldn’t make sense. We tried to rent the smallest car we could, but due to lack of availability got repeatedly upgraded to a colossal SUV. I have never driven a car that size, nor have I ever driven an automatic, so taking it out on the 101 freeway to the studio was an experience. There are no slow and fast lanes, everyone just fights for the space, and no one really indicates when changing lanes. It took a few days to get up to speed. THE CAR Our first four days in the studio were spent on pre-production; running through the tracks in the live room with Brad to figure out if we needed to change song tempos or arrangements. We went into this session with about 16 songs on the boil, and are hoping to record 13 or 14 depending on time constraints. So we have some pretty big decisions to make post-haste. INSIDE THE LIVE ROOM
LISTENING BACK WITH BRAD IN THE CONTROL ROOM Rowan
Well, our Spring/Summer soujourn in salubrious County Leitrim is at an end. For the past four months we have been holed up in our country retreat listening to the occasional dog bark, pheasant call or torrential downpour from the outside world. Quiet time would be an understatement for the surrounding activity. Our surrounds looked like this….
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Our neighbours were these nice people….
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We could try and decifer how well we were getting on with a song depending on whether the cows came up close to the house or not. Regularly they would turn en masse and depart for somewhere they found less threatening on their ears.
It’s been a great few months. We went down with a semblance of what we thought the album would be after rehearsing in Dublin for a few months but quickly we found that being there with nothing really to do other than play our instruments our rehearsal time doubled without us really noticing. We were able to explore new textures for the songs and had fun playing around with sounds and vocal ideas. New songs arrived and old ones got pushed to the back. A slow song that had been floating around since last year was fleshed out and finished through us playing it a few times every night until it grew into a monster and possibly one of the best things we’ve done.
Many tea breaks were had and we seriously pushed the boundaries for how many Tesco Value Bourbon Creams any one person can eat in one day. Turn your back for a second and the just opened double pack would be a smattering of brown crumbs and the soggy end of a tea cup.
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This is where we did our work.
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We were all very close together for playing and singing and someone even slept on the ground in this room every night. We were true pilgrims. I’ve heard of a lot of bands doing something like this – heading off to a house somewhere to work on an album. It’s a very rewarding experience. Everyone is there all the time and even if you’re not playing together you might just be hanging out watching twenty four episodes of the U.S. Office in a row. Even then you have the album on your mind and you can toss around ideas about how you think it should sound and what songs people like.
We got pretty good at recording and might have a go at doing some of the B sides for the album completely on our own.
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When no one does the washing up this is what happens.
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Here’s some photos.
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