Tuesday 18 December 2007

one more day and then it's christmas break

...and a very deserved one for us I believe. Tomorrow we will do an alternative version of pine tree. We've done an early "neo-bossa-beatles"-version that was alright and we have done a dancable "franz ferdinand meets bloc party"-version that didn't got very well together with the lyrics, but now we think that we've found the version we're looking for. We tried it out last week and tomorrow morning we will nail the piece and commit it to digital media! Yes!


More news tomorrow.
tada!
Markus

Thursday 6 December 2007

3 + 3 songs and more to come!

Hi there!
I know it's been dead silent for a while. The reason for that is simply hard work. The last weeks we've been recording and working with artwork ideas together with Sussie. The dead line I wrote something shortly about was the dead line for the first set of songs that was to be sent to Oxford for mixing. Three songs are completely recorded so far and three more are ready to be “shipped to England” later today, or tomorrow at the latest. The (by far) hardest thing in the recording process has been recording lead vocals. Nothing is of course as important as the vocals and we’re not talking about auto-tuning, pitch shifting or any of that synthetic crap, only about reaching for the inherent feeling that is captured in the song. Joel likes to do full takes, which means that he doesn’t record the same small phrase all over again (of course sometimes some minor "cut and paste"-things are needed). It's so easy to loose the feeling if you don't get the entirety. But I guess all methods are good if they work for you.

We have really been blessed with good functional equipment so far. We've been using two microphones from the late 60:ies/early 70:ies and an old analogue mixer from the late 70:ies all the time without any problems at all. So far we’ve only broken two guitar amps(!). It’s a pity it’s so expensive changing tubes on those goodies…
We haven't had any computer probem.

yet....

oh no, I can't believe I wrote that!!!!!!!


hmm...


Have a good night´s sleep everyone!
/Markus