14.9.2007

We did some gigs this summer and the Demo has been a success in that people seem to want to buy it. We got a bit restless and decided to record some more as well. We recorded in a really nice studio in Helsinki. This time we all felt that we needed a real producer to help us. One weekends worth of recordings are now done, and the result is pretty good so far. A few more days, and we will have some more demo songs again. The gigs and studiotime have been helpful, but we still need so much more exprience. More gigs, please :-) Oh, and both Teppo and I have gotten new amplifiers that rock ever so much! (Teppo's Ampeg/Orange -combo looks quite good as well). My Elmwood Bonneville setup (www.elmwood.se)is a work in progress, but the sound is somewere between a Marshall and a Boogie I suppose. 50w of 12ax7/EL34 tube wonder.

The web pages need to be re-done soon, and the guest book seems elusive as ever.

4.2.2007

Last vocals recorded today. Demo album cover should be ready as well. Johannes did a really good job on it! The next step is to get about 100 cd covers printed and burn all the cds... Will this never end?

We really need to book some gigs now!

 

7.11.2006
It’s been a long long project, but the end is nearly here! We recorded all the drums and some vocals in a small studio in Hyvinkää. All went well, except that we had some problems mainly due to a no-show by the studio tech. We certainly learned a lot in this process. We all felt that working In a studio environment was by far preferable to the DIY experiments that we had done before. That said, we still decided to do the bass and guitars in our home studio. We basically have the same software as the studio, so it was quite easy to continue were we left off.

It would however seem that our practice space is inhabited by a poltergeist. A rather chatty poltergeist at that. So no recording could be done there. (Note from sane person: Poltergeist=Grounds Hum)

Our initial plan was to record the bass using a two channel setup with a BOD in one channel and a miked Trace Elliot 4x10 into another. Our little poltergeist objected, and we ended up with just the Bass Pod. All in all not a bad sound. It would have been nice to have a room sound to add to the mix, but who cares. We had to cut a LOT of highs to get the BOD to sound good, but it does sit quite snuggly in the mix so far.

The guitars were a different ball game.

The tools: 1 Laptop with Cubas SX2, 1 Sure 57, one mixer that speaks poltergeist fluently, Mesa studio 22 as power amp, Matchless hotbox as pre-amp, 1 whammy pedal and a couple of guitars. Oh and a shitty M-audio audiophile external sound card.

First of all the laptops power supply seems to be shielded in a way that is conductive to noise…. So I had to record using the battery alone. I know, I Know… Not only the power saving settings, but the bios settings as well. In the end it worked out, but the M-audio seems to be possessed as well. Can’t get rid of all the pops and scratches, no matter what I do! So some remain…

All the stuff fit nicely in a car, and was shipped of to the country, were we had access to a rather nice big wood paneled room with a nice view. (And a country poltergeist. I can’t believe how much grief you can have simply due to bad grounding).

The Mesa is plenty loud when it works, but with the Matchless I could not quit get the sounds I wanted. Cleans were nice, but “old mesa + matchless= Classic rock sound”. Ideally I would have wanted a Marshall sound for the distorted rhythms, and a VOX for the clean. With a Bogner for the leads. Next time ?.

The guitars turned out ok…I guess. 7 out of 10. It’s kind of hard to record yourself as you are playing. Ended up pressing play and running about 10 feet to a corner where the hum was not so bad. Punch –ins were out of the question. I would love to let somebody else handle the tech job when we record the next batch.
Everything was recorded dry. Vst-plugins should take care of all the fx. We’re going to borrow a pair of genelecs and do a preliminary mix this weekend. Then if it sounds good enough, we might master in a real studio. More likely we’ll play it for some friends and end up doing some of it over again before mastering.

Oh how easy it would be if we could book a pro studio for a week. This way we’re spending months doing the same thing. But learning a lot in the process.

Tha'ts all for now... Signing out!
Fredu

 

14.6.2006

Our first gig in front of an audience. We played a set consisting of most of our new stuff. Seemed to go over really well, and everyone felt relief. We were not that sure that 50 strangers would listen to about 12 new songs, and like it all. They all did! Oh Joy! Really Cool audience! See the pictures here...