Back in London

The first thing we did was try to recover from our jet lag. Not too make too much of a fuss about it, but it is nearly a week now and I have woken up in the middle of the night and I sit here typing when I "should" be sound asleep. Funnily enough I thought I was completely over the jet lag, but I stayed up late last night experimenting with different combinations of the equipment (more about that later) and I guess it has thrown me off. Andy has had it even worse, poor love......


I had planned to try to find a cheap space to work to record and edit vocals - somewhere with a pleasant vibe and daylight and a reasonable acoustic, for convenience, in North London where Andy and I live. I was not looking for fancy equipment (we have everything we need), and I thought it would be easy to find the right space. I had meetings on Monday and Tuesday with owners of a couple of spaces and they were just not suitable. MJ, out A&R co-ordinator at the record company was also active trying to find a space, but somehow it seemed impossible to get something appropriate at the budget I had in mind. Then I spoke to some friends who had an empty apartment in Hampstead, and realised straight away that it would be fabulous - comfortable, high ceilings, broadband wi-fi, big table. The only issue was that it is a residential area, and so Andy and I made a plan to be finished with singing every day around about 18:30. Obviously I can carry on editing vocals after that when necessary. We aim to start everyday at 13:00 or 14:00, giving us time in the morning to get to the gym, Pilates, Alexander Lesson etc etc. So I set up there on Wednesday, and on Thursday Andy came down for his first session.

He was very tired, having been unable to get to sleep almost throughout the night, until 07:00 in fact.(and he arrived a couple of hours later than we had planned, but this was the first day and I have plenty to do anyway, listening through to the tracks and starting to enhance and organise them for the mixing). That was funny I told him because at 07:00 I was in the "studio" finalising the setup, before I went to my Pilates class. However Andy was motivated and determined about singing, and after a cup of tea and a warm up we tackled the first song. The lyrics are still getting tweaked, and the network printer didn't work with Andy's laptop so he hand wrote the alterations he wanted to make and we were off. After an excellent session on this song (in spite of the fact that I still feel the music is not REALLY working for this tune - we put it back to more of the demo vibe after out A&R meeting Andy reminded me, but it ain't working yet!) we took a small break for Bengal Spice Tea.

We were now using Andy's mic (a Neumann TLM 103) and this combined with the sound of the room, gave us a vibrant and crisp vocal sound. My trusty 6176 with Monster cable was already in place. The SE Reflexion Filter had not arrived yet, so there was a little bit of extra room sound on the vocal, but not at all unpleasant.

And then on to the second song: I was impressed because I had not realised that Andy woud be tackling a second song, but that is a nice precedent for the session - 2 songs a day! We had done a great deal of preparation work in Falmouth on vocals (working every night on 1, then 2 tracks a night) and that is really paying off now. We have a clear vision of what we want to achieve, and that is, of course, invaluable. I finished the session by editing the first song whilst Andy snoozed on the couch.