Monday 25th June
Ok, after saving up all of our pocket money we managed to venture back into the studio.
This time we have put ourselves in the hands of Tom Peters at Hollyoaks Studios in Teignmouth (see picture). If you like what we’ve done and are you’re interested in recording there you can contact Tom at: pugsly43@hotmail.com
On
Monday we arrived at about 7pm to put down the drum tracks, Shaun and Gavin
stood with Lee in the live room and played air guitar while he recorded his
parts, then Shaun did the bass stuff and then Gavin did some of the guitar
parts. Quite uneventful really, Gavin managed to bang his head on the roof in
the bathroom, but that’s about it. Oh, and we put some new strings on
Shaun’s bass. The old ones were getting on a bit and were beginning to smell
bad.
Thursday 28th June
Gavin went in on his own this evening to do the guitar solos and other noises. That about it, however he managed to bang his head on the same bit of roof in the bathroom again.
Sunday 30th June
Today was the best bit, Vocals. Gavin, Shaun and Joe (a Dutch man that Gavin knows. He claims the Dutch invented sex, however it has since been proven that the English invented sex, the Dutch merely filmed it) arrived at about 1pm. Lee was running late due over sleeping. We jumped straight in with the vocals, without warming up. We sounded crap! After much recording and re-recording, trying to achieve ‘that’ sound we have live, we realised that with a bit of reverb, delay and chorus we can sound just like our hero’s Hear’say and S club 7. So we were happy after that.
Lee and Becky arrived at about 2pm, the studio was now beginning to get crowded and very hot. Then when Chris (drummer friend of Lee and Tom) came round it was almost like a big sauna with lots of sweaty men (have you seen the beginning of Red Heat? A bit like that but we’re all a bit skinny). Any way we continued with the vocals, its really strange when you have a set of headphones on and your singing along, then you look up and about 6 people looking at you and all they can hear is you and no backing. We finished the vocals after about 3 hours, some of guys took a break and went down the shop, Joe went home and Gavin and Tom stayed behind and did some sound effects: check out the barfing noises on ‘Throwing up on Wednesday’. When the guys returned it was Lee’s turn to do some extra percussion and stuff, he really is good at hitting things with sticks. Then we all went home in time to watch Last Of The Summer Wine, it was the one when Compo rolled down the hill in the bath.
Today we went back to do the ‘mixing’, this is when we all sit round and get bored whilst the engineer (Tom) plays with the recording, adding effects and compressing stuff. We all found the experience very moving and broke down in tears several times that afternoon.