Scrapbook Pages 19 -30

First Proper day at Mute

After my Alexander Lesson I cycled up through Hyde Park and Notting Hill to the Mute building, where I met James, our assistant for the session.


We did a bit more plugging up (I wanted to get my small Genelec monitors working) and pretty soon Daniel arrived for our meeting.



Our plan is to listen to all of the tracks in some detail over the next couple of days, and we made a really good start. One of the songs Daniel felt was still very busy, so we threw around a few ideas and were able to enhance it quite nicely - I'm sure Andy and Vince will like it too. Other songs we simply discussed mix ideas and approaches or made minor "tweaks" . I also started showing James how I want to get all the soft synths recorded, which is something we are going to do on a track by track basis.

Polly Scattergood is in Studio 1 with Simon FT and Kevin - I heard a little of what they are doing and it sounded GREAT.

Daniel and I had a great Lunch and Dinner from Fresh and Wild

Scrapbook Pages 13-18

Scrapbook Pages 7 -12

Pages 1 to 6 from my Scrapbook

When we left for New England I started a scrapbook - here are the first few pages. Chronological from right to left, and bottom to top

Moved the Studio

It took 6 hours to move the Studio and set up again in Mute Studio 2, so it was a big chunk out of Sunday - I blew a fuse on my Benchmark DAC-1 (it was still set to 110 Volts - oops!) but Oli managed to find a replacemnt and I was so pleased to hear Erasure coming out of the speakers at Mute - sounded great!! And it was a great feeling to be prepared for next week.

I look forward very much to the next phase - hooking up with Daniel tomorrow, finishing vocals and Vince's updates this week, and mixing everything next week.

The sky was very striking - this shot looking out over the canal.

Saturday Night Summary

So the "Vocal Recording Session" is finished now, although the Vocals are not quite finished :-) We have one Lead Vocal to redo, and one Lead Vocal to do, and quite a few backing vocals - I guess we have done about half the bvs. Andy and I work very fast at backing vocals - we have a long history of working together and we trust each other. Vince has worked his way through most of the songs and I have incorporated all his updates into the Master versions.

Tomorrow Oli (one of the assistants at the Mute Studios) is coming over to the Hampstead "studio" and he is going to help me clear everything down and set it up again in the Mute Studio 2 for the "Mix" phase. On Monday and Tuesday I have our A&R guy (Daniel) going through the tracks with me. Andy is rehearsing for his Food Chain gig early in December; he will be back later in the week to finish off the vocals. Hopefully all the recording will be pretty much finished by the end of next week. This is pretty much all still on schedule. (I tell myself and the record company!)

Then I shall be exporting all the synth tracks (which at the moment are running "live") as audio files, freeing up the DSP of the computers for all the lovely mix plug-ins that I want to use, to bring the tracks to the next level. Can't wait!

I use Logic Audio by the way, in case anyone is interested.