Playlist
Thomas Koner - Permafrost
Cloudland Blue Quartet - Bandcamp Sampler
Up early and some work and breakfast - all product-ed up with mug and T Shirt...
Drummer chum Keith picked me up around 9:15 and we drove to the studio to record with Kat McKenzie re her upcoming album...
I set up my bass upstairs...
...but ended up down in the control room with my amp still upstairs - a double input, DI and remote, mic'ed amp...
Keith got to grips with the V-Drums...
It turned out studio owner Andrea's library would come in handy later on...
The wildlife outside listened in...
..and Kat kept her Twitter followers up to date...
Three hours in and we had nothing useable down on tape...
Kat had spent yesterday recording her parts to a click track but when we played along it turned out we were concentrating so much on the click that the performances weren't up to it...
Kat wasn't best satisfied with the work she'd done yesterday either...
So we brought Kat's piano down from upstairs and started again, playing live to tape as a trio...
An hour later we had two songs down and broke for a quick lunch...
There were problems with the V Drums due to some seemingly random sound triggering...
We soldiered on...
But there was a lot of sitting around reading books from Andrea's library - "Uptight" re the Velvet Underground was particularly good...
I'd forgotten how labour intensive and laborious working with a band in a studio can be - these days I'm much more used to working on my own...
After five and a half hours we had keys, bass and drums down on four of the seven songs we were targeting to get done...
Kat continued to update her fans...
...while Andrea slaved over a hot mixing desk and PC...
..meanwhile my 1978 Traynor amp, continued to sit upstairs on its own...
By the six and a half hour mark, we were finishing off song number six and, half an hour later, the last song was down...
With seven and a half hours of our projected seven hour session gone, I started to add the guitar parts...
Upstairs for me...
...where I managed all seven songs in around 80 minutes...
Fast work...
The team...
Keith drove me into the town centre to meet up with Anne and chums Chris-with-a-Ch, Gillian, Martin (Ferret) and Martin's new girlfriend, Marianne...
After a couple of swift(given my tardy turn up) drinks, we walked down to Kushi's for a slap up feed...
Beauty and the beast taken by Chris...
...who was then asked to return the camera by the man with the unattractive hands...
Marianne was found to have shoes in her bag - apparently this is de rigueur for young ladies these days...
Your correspondent continued to indulge...
...which no doubt prompted him to advise Martin to make sure he didn't muck things up with Marianne as she was such a lovely girl...
Meanwhile Chris liked this portrait of his cross and rosary beads...
I failed to convince him of the stupidity of religion...
Post meal, over to Planet Out...
...where a good time was had by all, except Chris, who seemed a little uncomfortable with some of the girl on girl and boy on boy action taking place around him...
The Beast and the Exec Producer took to the dance floor...
The party moved on to The Glasshouse...
...where more drinks and laughs were enjoyed...
A taxi home around 1am to find arrived parcels, the Nitin Sawhney CD containing a track used in the one of the ballets we saw at Saddler's Wells while in London recently, and the translation of "Faust" - which seems not to be that but is in fact a play based on Goethe's epic...
Anyway, collapse mode...
Good day...
Highlight of the Day : Recording and a night out...
