Listen back to the chosen take of chinese blues and to our relief it still sounds great.We decide to have our first bash at overdubbing.
With such a limited number of tracks we are going to have to put as many instruments as possible down all at once onto one track.
So we try to put down 2 acoustic guitars (with fran and andy sitting round one mic) a glockenspiel, a shaker and a tambourine all on one track. The performance is fine but we run into our first major stumbling block with the machine. Without getting too boringly techy about it, the malfunction basically means that we can't listen to what we are doing when we are doing it. Quite a prohibitive problem.
Things grind to a sticky, worried looking halt as we try and work out the best way to move forward. Experts are called and we find out the good news is the problem can be fixed but the bad news is, not til thursday. This is a bit of a pain as the golden rule of the studio is to keep moving forward.
So the consensus is that the best thing to do is to keep on tracking new songs and worry about overdubs later on in the week.
It is at this point that the day takes off. We decide to put the songs down in the order that we were playing them in the shows so next up is j. smith.
The funny thing about doing things this way is that it puts the nerves back into recording. which is of course an excellent thing. Pro tools and it's ilk have kind of eradicated the performance aspect of recording.
We do 4 takes have a listen and then, after a few minor tweaks, do 3 or 4 more. All of the last lot are great but it doesn't take long to decide which take feels like the definitive one.
With spirits up and enthusiasm at a premium we then, in quick succession, rattle off something anything and long way down! They sound huge with no embellishment. Which is a very gratifying thing indeed.
The old machine may be a bit tempramental but it's making us do things it's way and that seems to be working for us.
It's all sounding so good that as the clock strikes midnight and we roll into big neily's birthday a celebratory whisky is had by all. good times.
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