The engineer today was one that I haven't worked with before, but I do know him, though I haven't seem him in so very long. Rob Huskinson, who is a fantastic musician. We both played bass on the song, and he plays the drums, as well as coming up with guitar parts for me.
It's interesting how songs can be shaped from the writing of a song, to the end product. When I wrote the song I expected it to be very grunge rock sounding because of the chords and lyrics essentially. When I got into the studio and started playing it though, me and Rob decided to alter it. First of all I wasn't going to use an acoustic guitar at all on the song, but then decided to use one for a lot of the song.
Once again it was one of those songs that I write where there are different sections that use different tempo's and feels. I sort of like playing with the whole concept of contrast. It also makes it interesting when writing songs, because you can go to places where you can't with a straight forward piece. This song for instance has a complete story to it, which is incredibly dramatic in a way.
Additional to this is the fact that it changes key for the middle section, and then goes back again. This is always an area where you have to really work on how to in and out of that, without it sounding completely wrong. A quandary for so many that.
The verse and chorus parts of the song were in my original vision straight forward grunge, and I just played the acoustic track that way sort of, and then added the clean guitar with Andy Dawson's Fender Telecaster, which is a beautiful guitar. I also did clean guitar on my own Ibanez. When double tracking it's sometimes good to use more than one guitar to git that sound of multiple guitarists essentially.
Other parts added today were a "swell" guitar, which was basically playing the chord, holding that chord, and then turning the guitar up to get a sound sort of reminiscent of an organ. There was another guitar added in the choruses, and the bass part for the main body of that song was by Rob, with me and him "punching in" some additional bass bits.
After this Rob played the drums for that main body of the song. Then I laid down the distorted guitar tracks for the middle section, to which bass was added by me, and then Rob put drums down to that. Then I played acoustic guitar again for the return to the main body of the song after the middle section. This was then followed by me singing all of the song's lead vocal (double tracked, which means I recorded them twice to get a sort of feel I like that warms something up), and then Rob double tracked lead vocals for the middle section.
Finally, Rob added claves, and I added shakers to give some percussion to the song. There are probably one or two things that are still needed, but that's pretty much a song done. Written one day, recorded the next. Catch it while it's fresh. The lyrics were altered in places, but that happens with most people's lyrics I believe. It's well documented that John Lennon's lyrics were never the same at time of recording to what they were when he first wrote songs. Not that I'm comparing in any way, but I'm just saying that these things happen.
So, a productive day then. I hope that this was fascinating to you. I may go into more detail tomorrow, but right now I'm absolutely shattered and want to get to bed. Take care everybody.
Thank you for reading, I hope it wasn't too boring.
Marv - 25th February 2011 (40 years, 2 months, and 30 days old)
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