How To Record an Album in a Week

After the after-match celebrations backstage on the night of the Hard To handle Reunion, and after all the gear was packed up and loaded into various cars and vans etc, the sound engineer - Dan Howard - ex click studio, Hamilton and I made our way back to my place where we proceeded to unload his van (again) and turned my office into a rather compact recording studio, where we collected all the relevant audio tracks and bounced it down (technical term) to a single file, so that I could have a listen, and make notes.
After packing down again and loading up Dans van, he hit the road back to hamilton at around 5.45am.
I had to be up at 8am (Rock n Roll and domesticity are not really compatible) I listened to the album several times through (its 52 minutes long) and made individual notes including the time - ie 2.09 minutes in Lead Guitar Solo - bring to front of mix. These notes were made of every instance something had to go up or down or mute from the recording - for example, as the guys were finishing Nadine, I put my guitar on, and hit a chord to get my levels etc - Dan was able to mute that out of the final mix. Later that day, Bruce came round and we went over it a few more times. I then typed out all these edits, and emailed it to Dan in hamilton. He had the album for 2 days to make 4 pages worth of edits, not to mention all the other stuff he does - like compressors, effects on the vocals, getting the overall rhythm section tracks balanced etc and all other stuff I dont even want to know about!. The Final mixdown arrived back to me at 4.30pm Monday, only to find that instead of a seamless live flow to it, the computer software had automatically placed in a 2 second gap between the tracks, so Tuesday night, Dan spent fixing this wee glitch. On the night of the gig, Bruces girlfriend, martine had taken heaps of photos of the night, so on Monday night Bruce dropped off a CD with all those images, and I started work on the album cover and track listing etc. After a couple of nights up till 1am, I had the cover whipped into shape, and sent it to the printers on Tuesday morning. I contacted local Tauranga resident and former keyboard player with the Narcs, Liam Ryan, who put me on to a chap to get the cds duplicated. Thursday morning and the Covers were all printed and ready to pick up. My wife Holly had to make an emergency trip to Hamilton to collect the new CD master, and return it to Tauranga before lunchtime, when I had arranged for the CD duplicator to collect it. At last all the pieces of the puzzle had come together - from now on it was all just sit back and let it come together. Bruce and I spent Thursday night folding covers and assembling CD cases. I a writing this on Friday morning. at 12 noon I pick up the duplicated CDs and put them all in the cases, and we are done! Just like THAT!!! An album READY FOR SALE in under a week! PHEW - what a mission There are some good things AND some not so good things about this album, and I will mention them here. GOOD THINGS: This album was recorded LIVE There are NO overdubs WHATSOEVER All that was done was the instruments mixed up or down in the mix This is the most honest representation of a band you could get - This is what we sound like, good or bad It was a really exciting, although nerve wracking experience - the pressure was ON BAD THINGS On the night, the harp was so quiet on stage I couldnt hear it, and at one particular point I was playing by BRAILLE, and going on instict, and consequently the accuracy of my playing suffered, hence a few dodgy notes here and there. To get the album out on time, there was no time to fix up the above, or the odd bass note missing, or where Tim, - the keyboard player on the night -who is not 100% familiar with all the songs shot the ending by a note (I know, big deal!) or cut and paste over where I sing the wrong words! Recording over one 50 minute set, gives you no room for error - If it had been recorded over 2 days, or 2 gigs, if you mucked up a song on 1 day, you could replace it with the same song from the next day, or maybe even a different song. This way it was 1 take and thats it! So now all we need to do is SELL IT, and with the Jazz fest almost here, lets hope we do just that! We have a couple of gigs at the festival in Harringtons Nightclub once again. THEN, on Saturday night, Beano is off to play for Kokomo, who are doing the support gig for Georgie Fame, and that is exactly where I shall be - and I cant wait. Happy easter everybody - enjoy the weekend. the fabulous, most groovy brilleaux maximum rhythm & blues p: 07 543 0334 m: 021 2368800 e: brilleaux@xtra.co.nz w: www.brilleaux.orcon.net.nz blog: http://brilleauxmaximumrnb.blogspot.com/