Abubilla Music

12.04.14 This Week in the Studio

Written by Jimmy

Three days of intense Studio work this week.  Brief summary:

The Music

• Goal was to ‘wrap up’ Chris’s Discovery Album and to ‘break the back’ (we think this is a technical term) of Tati’s second album.  In addition, inspired by our gig at Leon on Friday, April 13th, we wanted to record a couple videos from Chris and Tati’s performance.
• With Tati’s album, we added a couple new songs, but then focused on a lot of overdubbing for all the tracks. And the good news is that Tati wants a massive dance song to fill the halls on Friday night at Bristol.  So watch this space.    Songs we worked on included:  Misrepresentation, Call Me, I’m Not Gay, Believer (formal It’s About God), and Cat Boyfriend (with the dreaded ‘Meow’s’).  We worked most of Thursday and some of Friday on this.
• With Chris’s album, the main focus was overdubbing and to sort out the song order.  We’ve roughly agreed on :  18 Years,  Play with My Mind, Cut My Hair, Sticks and Stones, Be Like You, Walkaway, Siren Song, I Don’t Mind and potentially Jerusalem (a hit from the Friday night gig).
• With live videos, we took advantage of some new recording gear to set up a nice little recording studio in the front room and completed videos for:   Jerusalem/Swing Low Blues Version (you won’t believe this one), Call Me, Misrepresentation, I Was Drunk Then, and a  cover of Teenage Dirtbag.  All fun and we had a lot of good vocals from Jesus, who had his last day with us as an Abubilla Music (very sad, but to his great credit he’s off to music studies).

Everything Else:

• A big discussion was around the lessons learned from the Leon Gig.
  • Move to Stop Making Sense Song Order vs. Artist order.  This refers to the best concert film of all time (with Last Waltz a close second) where the Talking Head build the stage one instrument at a time.  We’d like to have an acoustic set, an acoustic with base set and then add the instruments to do a band set, but mix our Discovery Artists with the SMCC.   The broader group loves to play together so much we think it will work.
  • Sort out logistics at venue:  We need to give our audience better access to seating, air and liquid. They are not overly demanding but do expect this as a minimum.
  • Do spontaneous blues numbers less well.  The gig ended with Chris singing Sweet Home Chicago. The band, quite improtu, then joined him. But they somehow made it look like this was all a gimmick and that the number had been well rehearsed. For the record, it wasn’t.  And the band will be more rubbish next time when something like this happens.
• Kit.  We got a seriously cool bit of recording equipment, the Zoom 4HN, which when combined with our new lighting equipment, has allowed us to set up a fairly impressive video studio in the front room. Thus the six videos.   Andy will write a blog on all this.

That’s it.  Now it is about mixing the two albums and preparing for the live gig at Half Moon on April 29th.