Andy tells us what he's been up to

Andy came to the studio today and did some more excellent backing vocals. We tried the "problem" lead vocal again, and still it's not really doing it for us. It just never seems as good as it should be (unlike the other songs!). O well - there's always one! I was feeling a bit under the weather (I've got a bit of a cold - in fact I am enjoying a hot toddy right now) and I forget to save all the backing vocals for one song. Then the machine crashed. oops. Obviously the vocals were all on the hard drive, and because had been using "punch on the fly" and always starting from a bar it was a relatively simple matter to put them together again. Irritating all the same. We all make mistakes. Luckily I got away with this one.

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.