Abubilla Music

This Week in the Studio: 10.04.17-18

Written by Jimmy

Ed’s pretends to go ballooning, Soph arrives hungover and uncensured, Steph meets the band, Mike arrives late,  Martyn goes ‘walkin’, and Gus gives it all a miss and comes a full day late.   But three more songs and two very sunny days — Bring on the Ash

Okay, 5 things to tell you about:

1. Music:  In the actual studio we had two very good days.  Saturday,  Jimmy and Andy started the morning writing  ‘The Only Thing Missing’ and rewriting She Knows.  We laid down some basic tracks and welcomed the band.    Martyn and Rob arrived and we focused our time first on The Only Thing Missing, fighting at every moment to keep it reggae and avoiding country.    This mostly meant forcing Andy to take his Cowboy Hat off and stop saying ‘howdy.’  Once he started making deep toking sounds he got in the groove.  In Mike’s absence, Andy took over on drums and went thru a long conversation about not being able to fully control both feet and both hands at the same time.   But again, deep toking sounds tended to help him.   Young Martyn delivered an outstanding solo in the middle 8, motivated by deep toking sounds, and we think we discovered his ‘inner reggae.’   We then shifted to She Knows, and taking advantage of Ed’s absence (pretending to hot air balloon), we ‘finalised’ She Knows (Ed doesn’t like where we’re heading, but if you snooze, you lose Balloon boy).    All well and good.  Two new songs and a couple fixes, including Mike finally arriving and laying down Congas on She Knows.  And then, Gus and Jimmy got together on Sunday and Gus took a cut at both songs, and really nailed The Only Thing Missing.  He and Andy will have a battle for the bands on She Knows.   Gus also laid down Fairy Tale.  Tory listened and begged her dad not to ruin it by over dubbing lots of stuff. Thus is the confidence of his children.  So that’s it musically.   Three songs, competing vocalists, competing drummers,  studio opened both days of weekend and Ed pretending to be ballooning.
2. Cello Nipple:  The Bitch slappin’, Cello Nipple, Hung over Cello player is back.  Un-beknowenst to our vast viewing public, we suffered recently from China like google censureship.  We had been happily blogging about the studio and a certain someone demanded we take down certian things about her because she was going thru job interviews and internet searches.  So we removed the best of someone.  Well, then at the studio in the sun on Saturday we asked about it and she said, ‘sure, get it all back up there.’  So we will. But the short highlights are:  a) Sophie is our cellist, b) she is usually hung-over on Saturday mornings but pretends to have the flu, c) she uses really cool phrases like:’ i’m going to bitch slap that blog when i get the internet up in my flat’, d) she gives  lectures on cello nipple and e) in The Only thing missing is me, she kept thinking the line  ‘I’m sitting here on this fogged up bus’ was something else and walked around my children singing her version of the lyric!   We truly love her, but she’s setting our child-rearing policies back a few decades.
3. We introduced Steph into the group – more on her later, but we have some admin things to clean up.  She agreed that Sophie was a bit fogged up on Saturday, however, which makes her ‘a ok’ in our books.
4. It was sunny.  So we stayed outside a lot.  Well, Mike did.  When he came at all.  Which was late.   After the drum playing.  which is an important oversight for a drummer.  But he did enjoy pizza and sunshine.  And he played the congas.  over the bongos. which was odd. Which was okay, because we deleted him from the mix after he left.  Which was early.  After he ate pizza in the sunshine.  And shrugged his shoulders at Andy’s drumming.  Who shrugged back and deleted Mike’s conga playing after Mike left.  Early.
5. Martyn took Gus’s song Walking and turn it into ‘Walking, fall over, and try to get back up before the song ends.’  So Martyn did really well on a guitar solo in The Only thing Missing.  and he got a lot of praise.   Cuz it was good.  But praise is bad for Martyn because he gets confident and noisy and opinionated.    One of his opinions is he hates songs with two time signatures.  Feels its lazy.  So he decided that Gus’s Walking needed fixing because it slows down a bit in the middle.  So he recommends we do something to fix it.   Now Jimmy left the room at this point to talk to Steph and hannah about business stuff (outside, mind in the sun).  And Andy works with Rob and Martyn.  and rob is making sour faces which is never a good thing.   And Jimmy left them with a lovely song with a nice little pause in middle, as Gus (actually ed on this take) does his little slow guitar riff before starting up again.  And it was called Walking and the song kinds of ‘walks thru.’  Well, by the time Martyn had restructured the thing it should have been called ‘Walking until I got hit by a fogged up bus and collapse in a heap in the middle 8 and barely can crawl to the outro.’   So, we saved it as ‘10.04.18 Walking, feat MW’s new idea.  DO NOT OPEN.’   there are a lot of files like that!  Usually after Martyn delivers an awesome solo on another song and someone mistakenly praises him.   Like throwing a stone to Toby.

that’s it. 

Jimmy