re-cording studio

The mail brought me a couple of good ones a couple days ago:

Moloko : Do You Like My Tight Sweater?

Rammstein : Sehnsucht

Rammstein : Das Modell (single)

My friend got rid of all her CD’s and I got my share (FOR FREE!!!!). This morning I had a flashback she also had Olive’s Extra Virgin, now I’m waiting for her to respond if she still has it. Thanks KP for the good music :)

I spent last weekend preparing and recording one local death metal group, and mostly only preparing, since the guys cancelled the Friday. Finally on Saturday we were on location in my studio (two hours late of course) and started to set the things up. Fortunately we have a huge double bass drum heavy metal drumset ready at the studio so we only had to pull the cords and plug’em to the mikes.

We started with demoing the songs the guys were supposed to send to my e-mail AT LEAST A WEEK before we’d start the sessions.. Well not a big deal, just a few amp-modelling devices and di-boxes later the guitarist and the bassist were also ready to go. After the first song down I remember what the guys had told me in the meeting a month ago..

Me: “Have you guys been to a studio before?”

Guys: “Nope.”

Me: “Is this your first band?”

Guys: “Yep.”

It’s fun to watch people record music in a small room when their concentration is mainly focused on the moves rather than actually playing the songs in time according to the other musicians. So we ended up with a really crappy sounding demo which we couldn’t possibly use in any way later. Then we did the other five songs.

There we sat on the couch with the really old-school sounding six-song demo. We decided we are going to record the vocals, so the guys called the singer. A while later the vocalist phones back, asking directions to the studio. We found out he was actually something like 4 kilometres away from our location.

Another while later he showed up and we began recording the demo vocals. Nowadays it seems also irrelevant to be silent when recording someone else than yourself. The guitarist applied this new-found rule everytime we pushed the red button. He was talking in the phone, walking in and out of the room, even after we told him not to. Well.. they were only the demo vocals, so no big problem here.

—

Sunday began with a cup of coffee with only the drummer. It seemed like the best possible desicion to leave the others out while we’d record the drums properly. We miked the drums again, this time leaving the other bass drum alone, just applying a double pedal. Nothing special with the microphones this time, two overheads, two mics for bass drum and clip-ons for all the others.

I tried to make some kind of a click track for the drummer to follow, but during recording the first song I realized it wouldn’t be necessary. Actually it was impossible to use any computer created tempo maps, because the drummer laid the tracks down with good precision just following himself. There wouldn’t even have been a need for recording the demo’s in the first place, because he did the songs in such a good manner <sarcasm>(without paying any attention to anything that was on HD already)<end of sarcasm>

We didn’t spend more than four hours preparing and recording the whole lot! We sent the drummer home and I was left alone with the editing. On Friday we’ll start putting the low-end in place, so next stop: Death Metal Bass Destruction.

As I have mentioned earlier, I’m reading a book by electronic musician Petri Kuljuntausta (Äänen Extreme). To this point the book has been very interesting and given me lots of inspiration. Anyhow, this morning I finally reached a part that made me put the book down and start writing this rant of angriness.

It is known that Petri Kuljuntausta has sent a musical composition to space. He included a piece on board the Huygens space probe which landed on Titan, one of Saturnus’ moons, in 1997. Petri’s amazingly retarded idea was to put the composition and the instructions “how to play the piece with things found on soil of Titan” ON A CD-ROM! How can you ever assume the “People of Titan” would have had same kind of technological causality, which started with the idea of using rotating discs to store electronical impulses to reproduce sounds; and even further: using rotating disks to store digital data, reading them with Light Amplificated by Stimulated Emission of Radiation (aka LASER) with a machine that uses silicon-based microprocessor in companion with so-called Random Access Memory, Read-Only Memory, Graphics adapter, Sound producing devices, user output method aka display unit, user input method aka mouse and/or keyboard, etc etc.. And this all just for the machine to be computer cabable of running an Operating System (I assume some Microsoft’s product) with some kind of software that can actually read the instructions and the actual composition.

Sorry Petri, that idea is just lame and makes me angry. Why didn’t you for example send a toy piano with coloured keys and a block of metal with painted instructions which keys to press in which order? Well it would probably be too demanding to assume the “People of Titan” would have eyes and sufficient understanding to differ a colour from another.