Friday 30th LightHouse rehearsed between 9:30pm - 1:00am for our recording session the next day. We ran through all our original songs to make sure we had them fresh in our mind. Also, we carried out my idea to add a new section to "Sleeping Walkers II" that would relate it to the "Sleeping Walkers I". That is to use the original chord progression in part I as the basis for a new section in part II to bring it full circle. We all agreed this new idea greatly improved the song.
[3 hours 30 minutes]
We all met at 11am at the Polish Club to pack all our equipment into the car to take to Dubrek studios, to arrive at roughly 11:30. Although we only planned to be there for nine hours, we ended up working until 2:30am. We had originally decided to only record some live takes andc take the best of them. The producer Jay advised us to only keep the drums and bass tracks from the live takes and overdub everything else. This was because we were using an electric drumkit and therefore saved us a lot of time (than if we'd been using an acoustic one) to produce a much higher quality recording.It took roughly six hours to finish tracking the drums and bass in the live takes, and then about two hours for mine and Honza's guitars each. The setup for the guitars included a 70s Marshall head in the control room linked to a speaker stack in the live room with two microphones on the speaker and one ambient omnidirectional microphone to catch the spacious room's ambience.The acoustic guitars were recorded using one condenser microphone and only took about an hour and a half altogether.The rest of the time we spent recording Anna's vocals, many takes being done since she was very self-critical but eventually we reached a stage where we were all satisfied with the result. The mixing stage would take place on Thursday 5th along with recording mine and Honza's vocals. Altogether the session cost £250, meaning £50 each.
Here is a link to an initial rough mix of one of the songs - http://www.esnips.com/doc/52c2aa3b-1e5c-41c3-afb1-30f7d4e293e2/03-AudioTrack-03
[14 hours]
Sunday evening we hosted a party at the Polish Club to celebrate the recording of this EP combined as a leaving party for Anna since she is going away on Wednesday to Spain for several months, meaning Lighthouse will be on temporary hiatus until the Live and Unsigned Regionals in March.We played two sets, one where we played the EP in its entireity and after a break we played a few cover versions. In between and after we had other acts included an accordion player and the JJ dancers. I also did an acoustic set compiled mainly of easily accessible covers. A good time was had by all and when most people had gone me, Anna and few a guys from the open mic scene jammed for a while before going home.
[5 hours]
Total: 22 hours 30 minutes
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