Creative Midlands: "Sat 2nd April Creative Notts Guest Blog by Steve

Guest Blog – Saturday 2nd April: "

Today we spent 8 hours at ‘Stuckonaname’ studios recording our LP. Recording is hardly ever stress free, and this proved to be no exception.

The first obstacle was a noise we noticed on the guitar track which was a pain in the arse to sort out. I’d changed my strings to a lighter gauge the night before, and something to do with the brightness of the new strings combined with the settings on my amp, made this weird ‘popping’ come through. A trip to ‘Hot rox’ amp shop and some more new strings later, the problem remained after mucking about with the EQ and what not. We decided to persevere but the next thing wrong was a dead fret on my guitar. Fearing the neck was warped, our ‘tech’, Phil fooled around with a spanner until he identified the problem as a slight kink on the 5th string, which when straightened out, seemed to do the trick.

We recorded the songs again and carried on the rest of the day getting stressed out (well, I was, anyway) when a bung note was played or whatever stopped us getting a decent track down. We left around 8pm, ready to give our ears a rest…

Oh, before the recording we met up for breakfast in ‘Homemade’ in Hockley. Whilst waiting for everyone else to turn up, I drew dinosaur pictures whilst drinking too much coffee.

"

Guest Blog – Sunday 3rd April: "

Second day in the studio… We came back with fresh ears and listened to what we’d put down yesterday. It sounded fine, no awkward tweaking needed doing so we could now get on with the over dubs.

The first thing was for me and Harry, who plays bass, to record 4 minutes of harsh, horrible feedback to go over the top of a sample we’re dropping in the middle of the last song. It basically involved standing next to our amps making piercing squeals with our guitars and grimacing as it soon became hard work to endure. The was a point where it became almost cosmic (dude), and I couldn’t tell if the noises I was hearing were from the speakers or in my head resonating as tinnitus. I imagined the noise would fit well in that part of 2001: Space odyssey where the main character is traveling through deep space and visiting alternate universes. Or something.

After that far out experience I laid down some more guitar tracks and Chris did the vocals. It was around here where we wondered why we’d written songs that go beyond the 10 minute mark as listening to them over and over and over again, soon became tiresome. I think we were all relieved when it was time to go home. Sounds good though.

Anyway, this is my last guest blog entry for Creative Nottingham. Thanks to Charlotte for asking me to participate and for whoever read this over the last couple of weeks. Feel free to check out http://www.stevelarder.co.uk or http://stevelarder.wordpress.com if you like. I’m hoping to update the latter link a bit more regularly from now on.

Here’s a dragon eating a sandwich. Tara.

Creative Midlands

"Sat 2nd April Creative Notts Guest Blog by Steve_Larder"

No comments:

Post a Comment