I flew into New York on a Delta flight from Berlin a little over a week ago. This is the final push.
Monday Morning- I ventured to the art store on Bond Street to gather some pens and some art material for a doodle I was planning to do while Emery was mixing.
I arrived at the studio round 11. Emery was there. He got straight into he mix. Get Up. At the root of this song is a very strong rhythm track comprising of a very simple drum beat and 2 riffing bass guitars. We used my angle poise lamp instead of a ride cymbal and Neilly rapped on the wooden shell of the kick drum to great effect. The vocal for this was a sticking point at the RAK session so today I'd have to sing. Nice.
The mix process throughout this record has been swift. Like I said many decisions made at the source point of recording help speed up the mixing process.
While Emery twiddles, I get down to some drawing, cutting and colouring in. He looks over occassionally to inspect my progress. The piece of card I draw on has to be measured and divided up into many different sections so that it all hangs together. I messed up the measurements by a couple of millimeters and the whole this was out so I had to start again... This was annoying as I'd spent 2 hours and had to erase much of it.
By 3pm, Emery has the mix up to a point where I can have a go at singing. The sticking points in RAK were some quite high notes which sound like a bad impersonation of Cilla Black... All the vocals on this album are very live.
We spent alot of hours on previous albums comping some uber vocals together but I really felt that, while this process results in some quite perfect performances, this time around we needed to attempt wherever possible full vocal takes and then drop in to correct glitches. This, again comes straight from the day we spent with Geoff Emerick recording the Beatles song Lovely Rita for a documentary.
The RAK vocal for Get Up was great, aside from the Cilla moments. I really felt though, I could make it better.
After 3 takes we had the one. I had a break and a drink of some hot water, then went back in and did some heavy negative Cilla moves which did the trick.
Emery mixed for another hour on the vocal EQ and the sound of the rhythm track and then it was done. Ahhhhhh...
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