Solo Record

I write a lot of music, as in HEAPS, especially lately. Pretty much every time I sit down at the guitar lately I've written something. Not that much of it is good, but when there's this many songs getting written, a few of them have got to come off!

I think every songwriter will agree with me, we all go through phases of how we write. One month it might be sitting down at the piano, the next it might be playing with ideas as you record them. At the moment for me it's acoustic guitar. The thing about acoustic guitar is, you can almost hear exactly as you would like the band to play as you sit there and play and sing. Writing on piano I find is sometimes more conducive to writing solo piano and voice songs, as opposed to whole band ones... but that's just me. Writing as I record for me is generally an absolute disaster, ending with a thousand overdubs and experimental ideas and sounds, but not much resembling the song I intended to create in the first place.

So more about this record...

I started the first song, Good Enough for You, at my lovely new studio in Bondi (which I am absolutely loving by the way). All the songs are pretty much going to have the same instrumentation and I intend to record them all in the same manor to try to inject some common thread to the record. Some of the songs are slightly different to the others, so I'm hoping the recording will tie it all together.

Before I go into detail about recording this first song, I wanted to talk about the general aesthetic I'm going for this record, and how I'm going to go about it. I want this record to kind of sound like crowded house in the drum department, Beatles kind of Hofner bass sounds, slightly edgy and rough around the edges for the guitars and topped off with some modern, clean, up-front vocals.

I'm recording vocals and acoustic guitars to ProTools to keep them pretty clean and noise free, then they'll be transfered to 1" 16 track tape where I'll overdub the rest of the band instruments. Kind of backwards to how a lot of people work but there's no wrongs or rights here...right?

Anyway, so I tracked the acoustic (Rode NT5, about 12 inches from 12th fret) into PT first along with a click, then I spent some time getting the vocal performance ( just right (another reason I'm using tools for vocals is so I can cut together different performances more easily). With a solid basis for overdubbing onto done, transferred to tape and began layering on some electrics. I love the limitation of tape in this regard. I have been known to go way too wild with the guitar overdubs from time to time, and with tape there's just no option... you have to leave tracks for your other stuff! I mic'd the guitar amp with an sm57 and NT1000, summed to one channel via the desk, into a Joe Meek compressor and then a evans analogue delay. I took the delay off for the rhythm parts, using it only for the lead lines.

Anyways, that's probably enough banging on about this recording, I'll post if anything interesting happens along the way, and maybe I'll post some recordings too.

'til next time,

Nick