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.

Recording Jon Bothams EP (London)

So its been a little while and a lot has happened since I last posted. I have been back home and then back to London to record a 4 track EP for Jon Botham. What was first supposed to be a pre-production setup for the first few days before we booked studio time, ended up in being where we stayed for the rest of the tracking. We got such a great sound and atmosphere from hijacking his house near Stratford (Hackney Wick) from Wednesday to Saturday ( 08/09/2010 - 11/09/2010 ) Also with the help of my two favorite engineers Vera and Lil they made the experience so much more enjoyable and smooth running.

Everything was tracked through Jons Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 and into Logic Pro 9 on his i7 27inch iMac. We set up in the gallery while positioning the the listening point so we could all comfortably sit on a sofa and chill while Jon was tracking in his studio room. Pretty much all guitars were recorded with a stereo pair of Shure KSM 141 pencil mics going straight into the built in Focusrite pre's on the Saffire Pro 40. Vocals where recorded through one of my favorites; the original AKG C414 on cardioid pattern and going through what I now believe is a fantastic little tube preamp for the money, the ART Studio V3.

Now I am back in Germany and the real work starts. I have started piling through the tracks to find the right comp.

SOUND BLASTER

Its been a few weeks and I have 3 new tracks in the making. I am pretty excited about these as I am finally using a bit more guitar in my mix.

I have got hold of some old "Soundblaster" type multimedia speakers and plan to re-mic a series of licks using my Korg M3 through them. I got this idea from a group called Noisia. They run their baselines through a similar computer speaker and create some of the dirtiest baselines I have ever heard. Because these are so small, boxed in plastic and ported for extra bass, it resonates like crazy between a 500 and 100Hz. When I drive it hard, below this I get major rattle as the box wants to crumble and it just spits back at me. Fantastic distortion!

I bounced some pads this morning for track number two.