day one 12/08/19 .
a slightly grumpy horsemouth - a slightly inconclusive day.
while horsemouth thinks turn your heater on is a bit obvious howard’s friends love it - result. so they are taking another crack at recording it, this time to click and this time in a shorter version. horsemouth layed down the guitar part quickly and efficiently, howard will do the rest later, on to the next thing.
pagodas (debussy (mostly)) - it had a certain charm in its first version (but horsemouth muffed the first playing of the main phrase and couldn’t get the ‘sequencer’ guitar arts in sync - though this had its own charm), so time to rerecord it. resonator main, howard’s sweet sounding acoustic on the C minor (chorus), various slide and harmonic parts on the resonator, organ bass and a tremeloed/ violined f-g cluster to add texture. done - once again horsemouth didn’t get everything he wanted (but it’s getting closer) at least he got the sequencer guitar parts in sync this time.
the choruses are sounding much better though - that organ, acoustic guitar, slide guitar on the tune mix sounds great.
katie cruel (traditional) - nylon strung guitar to record the main riff recorded to click, bass and picking pattern on the resonator (tuned daddad), a vocal sung to each, then howard’s acoustic added because there was string squeak on the nylon guitar part (which turned out to have a string squeak in the same place also), then the first part replaced by a simplified version of the part, the banjolin on top (sometimes - it’s a bit of a beast and incredibly fucking loud). some slide guitar.
broadly this was the matrix of the song and when it was running in time it all sounded huge but there were various points where the whole timing came unstuck. possibly it can be saved with judicious editing or a bit of copy paste (there’s certainly enough guitar parts to chose from) or alternatively the whole thing could be re-recorded from scratch with just the simplified nylon guitar part and the resonator part. in the cold light of day it all seems sortable.
the steps forward - the double horsemouth vocals worked this time (opines horsemouth modestly), howard added some quiet but excellent backing vocals on the choruses, horsemouth left room for a solo this time.
japan (pharoah sanders) - just something quick to decompress at the end of a slightly frustrating day. horsemouth is of the opinion that this actually resembles one, two, three four, five (once I caught a fish alive). he recorded several times round the riff, added the bicycle pump tambourine (er on listening to the pharaoh sanders original he’s added a new element), the wordless vocal, a few single notes on the banjolin (and got howard to sing a vocal).
done - it was pissing it down with rain so a bottle of beer from the supermarket rather than a trip to the pub.
reconvene on wednesday.
the thing horsemouth has to realise about musicians of bremen volume four is that we are talking about a 2020 release (what even if we were being less ambitious and only talking about a limited number of tunes? yes horsemouth, even then.) the last week of august howard will need a holiday before going back to work - they can get the lion’s share of the recording for the songs they have done by then but that still leaves howard to tidy up edit and mix them in weekends and half-terms (stamina permitting). horsemouth should (of course) shoulder more of the burden.
day two 14/08/19 .
so horsemouth and howard reconvened on the wednesday to record more for musicians of bremen volume four.
first horsemouth added some tambourine and shaker to japan (it was sounding most morris), howard added another (quiet) harmony vocal and then (at horsemouth’s request) added an improvised melodica part.
horsemouth had brought down rob’s old bass and using this he recorded a part for blindspot trying to get a funky (but not too ostentatiously funky) kind of sound
after lunch (cheers howard) they had another crack at recording ride on (happy mondays) this time in 24 bit. they pretty much recorded it as they did before, horsemouth added the tambourines and shakers and some better slide guitar tracks. but when they listened back to their 16 bit demo (recorded with the aid of a bottle of beer each) it was just a better track. (horsemouth may put tambourines and shakers on that one).
howard had a plan to record a track and the slow it down so they got on with recording that track punchdrunk blues - howard recorded a trancey Dm/ D9 riff and (revealing a good midrange voice) some americana-type lyrics. horsemouth then added some banjolin, and acoustic guitar (dropped D tuning) and a rockabilly type guitar at reasonably high intensity.
day three 17/08/19
turn your heater on - frustratingly no progress here. a slightly hung over horsemouth and howard with a cold were unable to lay down a replacement rhythm track to click (to prevent speeding up on the choruses) nor to play it correctly all the way through. now horsemouth is a big fan of cheating at such moments (that’s what recording to click track is for) his attitude is influenced by even eisenberg’s the recording angel. howard seems to adopt a more purist performance aesthetic (that recording is the documentation of a performance - so cheating is not allowed). ah well.
they took refuge in blue crystal fire - here howard successfully replaced the uke part (originally recorded in 16 bit) and the vocal tracks (impressive). horsemouth then stepped up to the plate and delivered the acoustic guitar part (could’ve been better but it’s in time and in tune, job done) and underpinned it with a goth bass line. there is a uke solo that will stay in 16 bit backed up with some banjolin, there is also a drone made of two e-bowed guitars (that will stay in 16 bit too).
the bass and the guitar are on a long fade up throughout the track so that (in theory) the song starts as a voice and ukulele piece and gradually morphs into something else. (the e-bow drone should probably do this also). the parts are now there anyway.
new jerusalem days has changed - horsemouth recorded two vocals of the reverend sabine baring gould’s poem on broadbury down (sample lyric on broadbury down a gibbet stands). this recollects the murder of grace peard, patience rundle and patience’s daughter mary by the tramp welland and his subsequent execution and display of his rotting corpse in a gibbet there. horsemouth has taken some liberties with the words. he’s not sure they are quite in the right place yet - but they’ll either fix this in the edit or they won’t.
that just leaves confiding... which is proving elusive. at one point howard had the ukulele part replaced and the vocals sung but then they ran into a snag with removing howard’s vocal from the chorus (the better to permit horsemouth to sing on it in his inimitable fashion - it being much easier for howard to follow horsemouth than horsemouth to follow howard). the uke and the guide vocal had been recorded at the same time and so there was leakage between them - when howard’s vocal was pulled out a proportion of the ukulele vanished leading to it sounding weird. despite the work done on the backing vocals howard became dissatisfied and the afternoon’s work went in the bin.
horsemouth (who had been sitting around waiting to record his slide guitar parts mumbling supportively, and, truth be told, already had his nose out of joint from his failure in the morning to record to click) was a little grumpy at this point.
but it is, truth be told, the recording schedule he himself formerly advocated, record a demo and then re-record. it is just that now that he is actually doing it he has lost interest in it.
so they gave up and cracked open some bottles of beer.
they listened to pharoah sander’s thembi (astral travelling, thembi itself, bailophone dance) and discussed doing more co-improvised things in the time that remains to them to record. howard has a recording made on his phone of him and some friends humming in an art gallery as part of a training course (now this is very good).
--------------
today - recovery of equanimity.
monday - back to recording.
No comments:
Post a Comment