Recording Dunning Kruger Band's EP in Lindau

Last week my band Dunning Kruger spent the entire weekend tucked away from distractions, in a grand old house in Lindau (Germany), recording our EP. It was truly a great experience especially due to the fact that we had/ have a fantastic engineer working with us on this project. Mike Senior, the man who is able to capture our live jams and turn them into something very special, without making it sterile or something it isn’t.

The intention behind recording was to capture the atmosphere and our best performance. The way Senior achieved this was to make us feel as comfortable as possible by turning the recording space into our practice room. The location couldn’t be more perfect. We recorded in the larger of the 2 living rooms and Senior took over the master bedroom to use as the control room.

Our live space, with its striking imperturbability was situated on the top floor. It’s original ceiling gutted, extending the total height another 3.5 meters and exposing the previous attics rather luxurious rafters. What a truly magnificent sound it was in there, embodied by the beautiful wooden flooring and the furniture.

Mike Senior, also a writer, experimented with micing techniques to confirm his philosophy and to help him aid his next book he is writing about the recording process. His techniques were somewhat very different to what is taught in colleges. He experimented with letting the room talk, by switching all microphones to Omni and stepping them back off the sound source a little. Although you see some close micing in the pictures below, these were just there for safety measures. 3 days of recording, and we are blown away by the results. 

Day 1 setting up.

Mike Senior adjusting the cathedral stand for the overheads

Peter getting comfy behind his drumkit

A shot looking at where I stood. Wedged between the two small sofas blanketed over to create a bass drum tunnel and the 3 seater that blocked a bit of my spill in the overheads. The AKG 414 was the live vocal microphone.

Chandeliers and the beautiful rafters.

Peter again, behing the drumkit. 

Blake's amp sitting quietly ( for now ) behind two chairs with plenty of rugs thrown over it. 

Paddy's bass amp.

Peter, organising his motions and where the toms should be placed.

My amp, completely closed in on on "Sascha", our last song we recorded that weekend.

Mike, adding markers.

Mike, going through the playlist and auditioning parts.

Drumkit closed in for our disco like sound on EnDance. We needed to tighten the room quite a lot on this track.

My amp, a lot more open on Japan Song and Endance. 

Drum set up for EnDance

Those clip ons are only for show. We didn't need them in the end. The toms sounded amazing in the overheads.

A picture of the enclosing over the drumkit to stop the rebound spill into the overheads.

A collection of snares. Here are two of the 3 snares we used on the recording. 

Drum mess

The first part to our DIY wall for blake's amp. 

Snare set up for EnDance. We wanted a beefy disco snare on this track, so plenty of paper and cloth got rid of the ring.

2012, a good start.

Happy New Year to all,

In the last few months of 2011 I managed to achieved many goals for 2011. Personal goals and goals with my Band Dunning Kruger. In December Dunning Kruger played our first 3 gigs in Munich and our best gig so far in Lindau early January. The responses we have been getting have been truly motivating. We have now booked studio time with Mike Senior; a great engineer from the UK, to record our EP in a large old house that has been kindly donated to us for the recording. It all kicks off on the 10^th February 2012, very exciting indeed!

My solo project is on the way and the set list is confirmed.  Gig bookings are in the process with the intension of smashing out a few open mic nights in early February. This week I will be cracking down on a live recording of a cut down version of my set, so I can post something here soon.

Dunning Kruger interview in Ohrwurm Studios

Check out the footage of my band Dunning Kruger recording EP 1 in Ohrwurm Studios. Footage recorded by Janine Stengel.

Dunning Kruger - In Ohrwurm Studios - from Dunning Kruger on Vimeo.

Studio photos of Dunning Kruger

I thought I would share some awesome photographs that was taken by Janie Stengel during my band Dunning Kurger's recording session in Ohrwurm Studio between the 24th and the 26th of June 2010.

Josy, the owner of Ohrwurm Studio, was kind enough to let us take over for the weekend. With this much freedom, Dunning Kruger was able to consolidate some riffs we had lying about during some practices, and arranged a song called Sascha, which we are very excited about. Keep your ears and eyes open for the release of our EP in Late August.  

Dunning Kruger Band recording in the Studio

I am back in the studio this weekend to record my band Dunning Kruger’s EP. We are very happy about the songs that are going on the EP and really looking forward to see the reaction we will get from our fans.

Although the studio is relatively small, we want to pull out all the stops and track most of it as a live performance. We will be rigging Peter on the drums and Paddy on the bass, together in the live room with Blake and myself on the guitars in the control room. All of us on a separate headphone mix and away we will go. We will be arriving at ohrwurm Studio near Pfaffenhofen on Friday evening to have a pre setup and perhaps a jam in the environment of headphone glory and order a couple pizzas before getting some kip on the live room floor. More on this later this week.

Dunning Kruger Band

Some really exciting things has happened over the last two months. I have met some of the most fantastic musicians and have now started playing in a band called Dunning Kruger. The name suggests the Dunning Kruger Effect whereby unskilled people make poor decisions and reach flawed conclusions, but their lack of skill denies them the ability to appreciate their mistakes. The Dunning-Kruger effect is what makes “Britain’s Got Talent” and “Xfactor” possible.

During the last two months we have put our heads down and pulled out all the stops to get our demo recorded. In just 2 weeks I managed to record Dunning Kruger’s first 2 songs, “Winter” and “By My Side” in our rehearsal space. Tracking was done over a series of evenings in this room on my iMac and with various soundcards and microphones we found lying around from the other band we share this space with. Nothing really special to note on any of the equipment we used, except that we found and used a D112 on the kick. The rest of the mics where cheap no-names or Chinese ripp-offs. Non-the-less, we got a pretty good sound for what we had available.
All mixing was done at home, in my untreated apartment, all in-the-box with logic pro. So here it is, The Dunning Kruger Band.


Dunning Kruger - Winter

Dunning Kruger - On My Side

Living room jam and recording session

A very productive Recording/ Jam session took place in my living room last Monday. Blake and myself have begun mashing ideas up to produce an upbeat folky song. We laid down a basic midi drum track and recorded acoustic, electric guitar, and xylophone. Recording was done through a SE2200a microphone using an ART StudioV3 tube preamp and into Pro Tools with an Mbox Mini. A very creative recording booth environment was created using two of my unfinished absorber panels I built in the summer of 2010 (link to this post) with a room divider/ shelf as the walls. The rear wall and roof were blankets found around the house.

We feel very excited about the songs direction and hopefully have something ready to post in the very near future. We will have another jam session tomorrow and work on the structure. But for now, here are some pictures.

Another Ohrwurm Studio bass session

Here's a few photos of a recent bass session I tracked for Josef Falsch in Ohrwurm studio.

Happy new year!

So happy new year to you all. I feel really good about 2011! A year for some great achievements. Some of which I have already achieved today.

Today the lyrics are flowing. I wrote a song called Winter Winter ( name could change in the next coming days ) in 2.5 hours. So far the idea is to have this one freestyle on the guitar and tracked on a 2 track tape machine. Keeping it clean and raw. But we will see how that pans out.

*Note to myself, write it all on the guitar - then throw it in logic and if I want the final piece without guitar, then at least the structure is there.

Recording bass for Honey in Ohrwurmstudio.

Josy from Ohrwurm studio kindly donated some of his time for me last night to record a new bass line for the EP I am working on for Jon. The first track "honey" is finally coming together and sounding less static now that the pre production synthetic baseline has been replaced. The bass was played by myself through a line6 Pod X3 and a soft compression was applied on a Urei compressor before tracking into Logic Pro 8.

I also found an old Jen SX1000 mono analogue synth lying around, so on my next visit I will be sitting on the sofa in the back making some noises to be used on my next production. Thanks again Josy.

Google is willing to help out record labels with the never-ending battle of piracy.

After trade groups representing the major record labels sent a letter to Google last month asking them to help combat piracy, Google replied in saying that they will put together a new standard paid option of $5 per thousand inquiries and will remove all links from their search to the pirated content.

Google is in a win win situation as they already make money on advertising from these pirated sites and now they are wanting to get into the digital music business.


Here is an example of how Google makes money and helps these pirated sites stay afloat.

Building Acoustic Treatment

A short time lapse of myself assembling a duel acoustic absorption and reflection panel for my mobile recording ventures.

The song in this video is also free for download. You can get the whole Trash80 - Icarus album at http://trash80.net/

Building my Acoustic Treatment from Kevin Fellows on Vimeo.

Schweden Records listening to Jon Botham

In the picture is Martin Deininger of Schweden Records in Eching, Germany. Having a listen to my mix of "Honey" by Jon Botham on a pair of PMC Studio monitors. Giving some of his valuable input.

Recording Jon Bothams EP Pictures 1 (London)