Sunday 13 February 2011

Studio 1, University of Glasgow

I’m sitting with my feet up watching Steve Portnoi working very hard on the Revenge mixes, which are sounding great. Our borrowed studio is lovely and warm, but unfortunately it’s also next door to an enormous amateur orchestra rehearsing the Planets suite, and we occasionally get the added sounds of drilling and hammering from the scaffolding outside (not to mention the rain today – yesterday was glorious sunshine) so it’s not necessarily the most relaxing environment. But then, both of us have experience of working at the BBC where loud hammering always seemed to start just as you were about to record something really quiet.  The giant Genelec monitors are very bright-sounding, which is great for hearing detail, but I keep having to dive for cover on headphones to get a sense of how the music goes – it’s a bit like everything being polished so shiny that you can’t always tell what it is any more.

There were a couple of bits that could benefit from a bit of added 16-foot tone, so I brought in my old fretless bass and Alison dropped in yesterday with her violone for some overdubs. Here we are with our collection of obsolete bass instruments, including the wild-looking violone bow that she’d bought the day before from Lionel Gliori. The danger with bass overdubs is ‘Wuthering Heights syndrome’ where (as on Kate Bush’s track) the producer fades up his own bass playing just a bit more than is strictly necessary.

It’s nice hearing all the chat between the takes again – can you guess who apologises the most? - and hearing some of the concert cockups properly is great. I completely forgot the intro to The Foggy Dew and played four bars of utter nonsense instead, which threw Jim sufficiently that he started singing in the wrong octave – and then the shock of that got both of us back on track within about half a second. Recovery, that’s what it’s all about.