Recording an album

I thought I'd give an insight into the recording of Mr. So & So's new album 'Truths, Lies & Half Lies'. We have really been writing this album for the last 3 years but it's only more recently, given the success of the Pledge Music campaign, that we have started to collate all our songs and get them out of the rough sketches and into the final piece that will make it's way into your ears. Within the band we have four writers Shaun, Andy, Stu and myself and we all get to submit music to the band, as I have mentioned in an earlier blog though I'm not entirely sure how the selection process works but it appears that the best tunes stick with us in rehearsals. It's the same principle when I write a riff, if I still remember it the following day then it's worth keeping, if not it simply gets forgotten.

Next up is arranging and unless there are already lyrics written, this where they are generally conceived. Arranging is my favourite part as this is where a track becomes smoother and refined, the decisions such as how many verses, how long the bridge section should be, what kind of textures are going over the bones of the track...these are all made at this stage and then over time the arrangement matures and becomes its own entity.

Recording the next album will be different than all of our previous albums as in the past we block booked a studio for say 3 weeks to track everything and then a short while later we book a studio again for the album to be mixed. This has changed, partly due to geography, partly funding and also fitting it all into our busy adult lives. To record the drums (always the first to go down) we have booked 4 days in a studio in the north west, then we will be recording the bass at one our homes, the same for the keyboards, vocals and parts of the guitar though for some of the guitar sounds we really need to crank up the volume of the amps in order to get the best tone so we may use a studio for a day or two. This is all possible as our secret sixth member, Al, who engineers all the bands recordings has a great selection of microphones and pre-amps plus we use Pro-Tools so it's on either my computer or Al's. The mixing will be done by Al at home as he can take his time with the mix and, like the tracking, we aren't worried about running over time and not being able to afford the studio time to finish the album at all (this VERY nearly happened with Sugarstealer).

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny thing and it grabs you when you least expect it and in a lot of cases that it happens to me, I'm normally on the train, driving the car or walking somewhere....not always when I have a guitar with me. I suppose that travelling must inspire me...never thought about that until now. When I need it most inspiration disappears, like moments when I'm recording a guitar solo and get red light fever it's amazing or when the middle section in a song dosen't work and I need to conjure one up really quickly, all my brain says is 'Just play E over and over again'.

In order to be inspired, and I just speak from my own experiences, I need to be totally calm and without any worry, in most cases getting bogged down by money, work, band politics etc. In the rare moments when I do get to relax on my own, inspiration comes flooding over me in waves like as if I have a back log, a kind of bottle neck of inspiration and I can write half a dozen really good riffs in half an hour. The really good part of this flood is the joy of realising that I've not lost the ability to be creative, writers block is horrible and it's really crushing the longer it goes on and I can only imagine how hard it is for someone as complicated as Thom Yorke who is also under pressure to be great all the time.

People inspire me, people I love and people who I don't, if someone impresses me with an act of compassion or  if someone is just downright disrespectful to me or someone else there is something in those moments that trigger enough emotion to open the 'creative' door as well. If you know me personally you know that I'm sunny side up and will always try to look for the best in people but occasionally I meet someone who is really beyond salvation and even these people inspire me to write the darker tunes....People I love make me write tunes and songs with good grooves and major key riffs. If you listen to classic albums such as 'Rumours', 'Dark Side of The Moon', 'Abbey Road', they are emotively very powerful and they carry the vibe of what was happening around the artists.