The album rehearsal shows have, i hope, left us nicely prepared to get the record down on tape pretty quickly. The songs feel just about ready to go into the oven.
It's a blindingly beautiful day.My walk into the studio takes me past the maternity hospital and i am filled with all kinds of frissons of excitement.
Claes and I arrive at exactly the same time and we head inside to see our lovely nick and delicious dave setting up the gear in studio 1,
a studio where we have recorded at least part of every album except 12 memories. Not to mention countless b sides.
Great to see Emery our engineer, who arrived from new york only the day before, and assistant engineer raj.
Inspired by the rather brilliant experience of recording "lovely rita" with geoff emerick on the original equipment we have decided this time to use old school technology. This means a rather large 16 track machine (actually two 8 tracks stuck together) from 1968.
The joy of this kind of recording is that it's all about capturing a band performance rather than sitting round a computer shuffling little chunks of music around. Also it limits the number of overdubs we can do as we only have 16 tracks to play with, and means we can't really drop in to fix any mistakes. So have to get a great take from everyone. It's all very exciting.
There are narturally a few teething problems with the gear but by mid afternoon we are making noise and begin running through chinese blues.
We go back into the control room to check how everything sounds and to be frank it already sounds massive. 2 inch tape and 40 year old machines are good!
We do a total of around 10 takes and go in to listen. there is something very arresting about the second to last take and the consensus is that it is the one.I can't see it needing many overdubs to be honest. Which is of course a very good thing. Time has flown though, so we must have been having fun, and we decide to call it a night. a good first day. good night. xd
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