Foothills.

 Photos from The Foothills. All photos taken by Esther Parker.

 

Drums with Alex. (Cool Rainbows and Mali Mali)

Yesterday afternoon Alex and I ventured out to Waiuku to the wonderful Revolver studios to meet Cass and Djeisan who had been there all day working hard on finishing the Cool Rainbows album.

When we arrived Djeisan was just finishing off a mix before we moved on to tracking drums and bass for 3 songs. One of which we originally recorded about a year ago! I Can't wait to hear it all done now, its sounding amazing.

By the time we finished for the evening it was about 1.30am. We decided to sleep over at Revolver and head back early the next day. So we woke at 7 and after picking up some drums from Alex's house and dropping Cass home we made our way out to my house for breakfast before starting recording drums for Mali Mali's EP.


The drummer that was booked in for the recording fell through and I recommended Alex for the Job, he did incredibly well (as I knew he would).

With the Mali Mali EP we're not really going for a full drum kit sort of sound (bar one song when we set up a full kit with the usual mics) its more based around percussive ideas I guess. I knew its the sort of area where Alex shines and he came with some great ideas but also had some really nice tonal contributions using different drums and tunings etc

We tracked drums for all the songs today and I was happy that my Highland Marching Pipe Band Drums got a look in and sounded GREAT. I think the Mali Mali EP is coming together in a way that I really hadn't anticipated (its sounding better than I thought) and its not even finished yet, Bass and Vocals next!


Overall a very productive 2 days!

Mali Mali Recording

Recorded some electric guitars for a Mali Mali song yesterday, Andrew ran his Ibanez AS200 through his fender twin and Peter used my Gretsch through my Vox AC15. Both such great combinations, barely any playing around with sounds, just stick a mic up and go!

Then we added another track of acoustic to a different song before they had to rush off, all in all a fairly productive few hours! We're slowly getting the peices of this puzzle in to place.

Mali Mali - Recording "The Ramp"

Today we recorded another song for the Mali Mali EP called "The Ramp" Ben and I thought it would suit this song to have the guitar and vocals recorded live. Because I had the luxury of having all my channels free I setup a few more mics than I've used in the past recording Guitar and Vocals live. I think when we were playing it back the Nady Ribbon and two KM184's in combination sounded the best.

The Beta57 was there incase we opt for a dirtier guitar sound and then Kiwi incase we want a cleaner vocal sound but for now I love how that Ribbon sounds with Bens voice, I will definitely have it up for later vocal recordings. I don't think we'll be using the room mic much.

Mali Mali

Ben came round and we tracked some more bits and pieces for Mali Malis EP. We re-did guitar on one song where Ben decided he wanted a tempo change and fortunately I was able to refer back to the blog I made from the original recording to see where I had mics sat. (Woo, my blog has been useful!)

We recorded the whole song at 140bpm and then I got Ben to play the slowed down part after the recording at 127bpm and moved it in to place. I put tempo changes either side of the moved in part so that the outro would be in time with the click for when we come to record drums.

We also recorded some guide vocals on the songs so when we get people in to play guitar and drums etc it will help them for reference as to the song structure. We had planned on recording the actual vocal takes today but found it really difficult to be inspired about anything without hearing the rest of the song sounding more like the final product.

We also recorded the loops that Ben has been playing his songs with live. We just recorded right from his boss loop pedal (except one song where we're going to re-make the loop in protools in time with the song, the other loops are more noises that don't have any impact on timing) They might get a bit of treatment in the mix to make them a bit more interesting but we wanted to keep the loops sounding quite lo-fi still.

Mali Mali - Piano Recording

Ben from Mali Mali and I headed out on a field trip today to Northcote Baptist Church who just so happen to have a rather nice Yamaha C3 Grand piano. I took with me my laptop, Digi003, Neumann KM184 Stereo Pair, Blue Kiwi and headphones, cables etc. We spent a few hours working on getting the right feel for his beautiful instrumental track Neice, which is going on the EP we're working towards.

The recordings are quite raw sounding, you can hear cars passing and children playing at the school over the road in the background and various creaks from the piano snuck their way in, but I like them.

While I had all my stuff with me we headed back to Bens house and recorded the synth outro and a kinda ambient loop he created for the song with his loop pedal. What a fun Day.

Mali Mali

Ben and I started work on Mali Mali's second EP this evening with recording acoustic guitar for 3 songs, we have plans to possibly record another all live and another with piano. I am looking forward to seeing how these songs evolve over the coming weeks.

recordingrecordingrecording

More vocal tracking today. Dan and I were both a bit (very) tired, which made for interesting recording times. But we got lots done and are happy about their album being SO CLOSE to being all tracked.

Tomorrow I have some time to catch up on some mixing and then in the evening I start on some new stuff with Mali Mali.