Pre-production
I wanted to write just a little bit about the process we’re going through recording. There’s more “over the jump” if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty details of the process.
As you know, we’ve booked a studio and producer, so we’re ostensibly in the “pre-production” phase. We’re rehearsing regularly to work up the tracks we’ve decided to record (more in a sec), but it’s often hard to tell how a track will sound recorded as opposed to live.
When you’re playing a track, if all’s well you’re in the moment and getting into it. But it’s often hard to tell if there’s a part that’s clashing with something else, or if something needs to be simplified. Hard to be objective too.
So to help give us a sense of what the tracks will sound like recorded, we’re doing some recordings at our rehearsals. Even though the quality isn’t perfect, it does give us the opportunity to really hone in on parts and how they fit together – and therefore give us a bit of insight into what needs to change etc.
Of course, our producer will guide us a lot in this regard too – and we’ve passed the demos onto her as well. But it’s really eye-opening (or should that be ear-opening) to listen to the tracks outside of playing.
The way we recorded was to lay down all the sequenced parts into an arrangement (in Ableton Live’s arrangement view) and then tracked some guide vocals. We then took the laptop rig into the rehearsal studio and ran the output through the PA, and recorded the live room sound (with all the live band) into two tracks in Live.
Even though it’s not a recording of a completely live performance, it does give us a little bit of flexibility in trying different things. Toby plays to a click, too, so it allows for a bit of experimentation with other sequence/keyboard parts if we need as well.
One of the nice things of doing this at our last rehearsal is that it starts getting us used to recording. It’s always pretty nerve-wracking when the engineer says ‘we’re recording’ – so this process starts to get us into the groove, and will hopefully take away some of the nerves later.
We can also record over a number of weeks and see how we’re progressing, what’s working and what’s not.