Hi,

I promised some more on making vocals work to show a lyric off to its best advantage.

Last time I talked about having a plan, and this is the basis of my delivery. However, unlike the performance of the music, where the plan is like a route map, the vocal plan can be delivered more flexibly. For example, the music plan might call for a suspended chord at a particular point, so if anyone deviates off and plays the wrong note the suspension is lost and the whole thing sounds wrong.

Not so for vocals – especially where the singer is acting as the story-teller, or the link if you like between music (the making of which can be foreign to some people) and words (which everyone can use).

So, while I might have it in mind that a given line of lyric is being sung to one person and needs the emphasis on a certain word, if I feel at the time an alternative approach works better I won’t feel constrained to stick to the original plan.

It’s by this mixture of planning and spontaneity that I hope to make a good performance to capture in the recording. If the words are merely recited it can sound inhuman and unexciting; if there’s too much vibe then the musicality of the phrases can get lost in the bad tuning!

So, in the end, it’s a balancing act to make things sound right and as if what is being sung is truly meant. Once I’ve captured a performance with those criteria properly met then I’m one happy singer.

I’ll be doing backing vocals next and will turn my attention to them next time.

One of the great things about being a record producer is that you get to do things other guys cannot imagine with girls they can only dream about! That’s been the case recently, as my side project with a female singer has developed. We originally set out to do a few demos with a view to getting publishing on a couple of songs. It now looks as if we may be making an album in 2009 and launching a new artist.

I want to talk about my voice this time. If you look at any sheet music you’ll usually find the legend “words and music” at the top, which suggests that the words (and therefore the singing of them) should have equal prominence with the music. So how do I start to get a balance between all of the instrumental performances and the lead vocal?

Again, it’s all down to planning and my planning takes three stages. First, are the words right for the context of the song i.e. is ‘I am unable to obtain any satisfaction’, while grammatically correct, accurate in terms of meter and for the character who’s singing the lyrics? ‘I can’t get no’ is so much better…

Secondly, what is the right voice for these words? Is it one with a shout in it, a cry in it, clear diction or slurred? Do certain phrases or words demand a different delivery?

Finally, to whom am I singing? Is it me, one person or a crowd? Again, this will affect how I deliver any given line, as a song may change audience from section to section or even line to line.

I’ll talk more about how I make this happen in the next instalment.

Cheers

As I said before, it’s been my turn to be busy over the past couple of weeks.

Keyboard parts first. Mostly nothing fancy, although I do try and avoid the blindingly obvious block synth wash wherever possible. I see the keys as pretty much a colour instrument behind the guitars in the band, so I like them to play a mainly supporting role.

Sometimes that role is standard – for example, on the ballad ‘Girls Don’t Look’ the song cried out for a string part and so it got one which lifts the second half of the verses nicely and swoops into the big choruses. Having said that, this song is an exception in that the piano is the major instrument and acoustic guitar takes the secondary part.

There’s also moments where the keyboards step out and take over – on ‘Come To Know’ we break out into a Bruce Hornsby style solo and the piano takes the lead line for a change. And that’s my point – it is for a change; for me it’s all about striking the balance between featured instruments.

I like the odd rock organ sound as well – so when you hear the record keep your ears peeled for a touch of the old Hammond coming subtly to the scene in several places.

Brings me to the instrument that’s always featured – the voice. While laying the keyboard parts I’ve been working out the last lyric changes, where the melody is going to move and how I’m going to interpret the songs.

All of which I’ll tell you about next time!

OK, I promised to talk about techniques for putting core tracks down, so here goes.

I guess the first advantage is we know pretty much what the melody line is from the guide tracks, so we have an idea about how the orchestration of the song is going to work – in other words, where to leave space for backing vocals, keyboard parts, colour parts etc.

This makes it simple enough to decide on some key aspects for keeping the basic tracks interesting – when to reharmonise a final verse or chorus, when to slip an unusual chord in, and just as importantly, when to keep the chord structure nice and simple.

For example, the opening track on the record is going to be Hook in My Heart and that will be at 212 bpm. At that speed, there’s not a lot of room for anything fancy, so simple approaches like restating the main hook as the solo break work fine. Later on, when the album slows down a bit, we can look at everything from playing the reprise chorus a tone higher to using completely different chords under the same melody line for a reprise chorus.

Our watchwords are ‘never the same pattern twice’ – in other words we’ll change an inversion, or substitute a chord, or add further instrumentation; and never the same technique too often – in other words, not every reprise chorus will rise a tone, not every song will fade out into the distance.

It’s time now to live with the basic tracks for a few days and then move on to vocals and keyboard parts – looks like this will be my busy time as the singer and keyboard player in the band!

I’ll tell you all about it next time,

Cheers for now

Well, here we are back at my place recording rhythm guitars and bass parts.

Why the two together, I hear you asking. The answer is inversions. Being a guitar based band with a songwriter who also plays keyboards can lead to some tricky situations. I might write something that hinges on an inversion that’s really easily to play on the keys, but twists a guitarist’s hand into a distorted mess.

Fortunately I also play the guitar so I’m aware of the risk – not that this stops me from wanting to use these types of chord positions. So, the approach I adopt is to ask my guitarist to play the normal chord shape but to ask my bass player to move his low note around to invert the root of the chords.

Of course if you’re doing this to set a song out it makes sense for the guitarist and bass player to work together in putting the core tracks down. So, rhythm guitars and basses go hand in hand for me.

It also a nice change to spend time working in sub-groups rather than the full four-piece. Spending some time with just the guitarist or just the bass player gives me a chance to maintain our working relationship and keep the social side of the band firing on all six cylinders too.

I’ll talk some more about the sort of techniques we’ve been using in putting the core tracks down in my next entry. Meanwhile, it’s back to work on getting the basic songs down in an interesting form.

Bye for now,

At last the talking is over and the recording has begun!

And don’t you just love drummers? They may be the butt of an easy joke (they always turn up on time but never in time etc) but I’m always in awe of how they remember exactly what fill they put in the song at point X last time and execute it again exactly at the same point this time.

Anyway, I took my AW2400 down to our rehearsal room for this week during the daytime, when it’s quiet, and set up. Seven mics – dedicated ones for snare, hi-hats and bass drum, two overheads and two ambient.

First problem – the bass drum sounded very boomy but after some trial and error I got it tamed. The rehearsal room is a bit of a box (this affected the ambient mics too) and in the end I did have to break my golden rule about recording with the EQ flat and apply just a little cut to the deep bass frequencies.

The good news is that the drums I’ve been recording are very well maintained and that makes getting good snare and tom sounds very easy. The rehearsal complex has drums available for hire and we often use them to practice with, not only saving wear and tear on the ‘real’ kit but also the hassle of transporting a lot of drums on practice days. Also, judicious use of practice heads (not least to keep your neighbours happy) does wonders for the life of your skins.

So the drum parts are down (all in one take per song, I always feel drop-ins on drum tracks are really obvious and sound unnatural).

I’ve taken the recording equipment back to my own place and it’ll be rhythm guitar and bass parts next – the anchors and chord structures of the songs need to be established.

More about this next time.

Well, the plan to record guide tracks is going OK and again has identified some areas to work on, even though we haven’t spent as much time on it yet as we would like.

The biggest problem has been that I’ve been doing a mini-tour to support my solo Americana album that I made with Fran Ashcroft last year. I’ve been travelling through northern England with it, starting at a very nice club in Birmingham and finishing up with a hometown gig in Manchester.

Anyway, I digress! Playing the guide tracks has been a boon in confirming that the songs are going to be in the right order and with enough variety to hopefully keep the listener interested. I think we’ve made the right choice to go for a running order that builds the record to a couple of climaxes rather than go for the modern approach of putting the most likely singles up first. After all, with CDs and mp3s people can easily change the running order if they think we’ve got it wrong.

We’ve needed to pick our times at the rehearsal room carefully to avoid spillage from the other rooms – at one time we used to practice there next to an enthusiastic young band we named the hamster stranglers, on account of their singer’s approach to getting his lyrics across.

What it has brought to the forefront of our planning though is that, when we go there to record the drum tracks, we better have exclusive use of the whole site.

I’ll update you on that, which is the exciting first step of actually tracking the record itself, next time.

All the best for now.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks – not least because the side project with the girl singer has taken off and we signed a publishing contract for some of the material. So, a confidence boost, and a distraction!

Work in the rehearsal room has concentrated on two aspects – key and tempo. I want this album to sound energetic and I need my voice to be stretched to get high levels of energy into my performance. So, much of the work with the new songs has entailed raising the key a few semitones until they sound just right – vibrant but not strained.

Similarly, we’ve been trying out the tempo of the songs to keep them bouncy but not frantic – bearing in mind that you don’t want an album of a dozen tracks all at the same tempo (or in the same key).

So, we’ve expended plenty of sweat with only a few changes to show for it. However, these are hopefully the few changes that will make all the difference to the end product.

The next step is going to be to record the guide tracks and, when we’ve lived with those for a couple of weeks, start tracking the album properly. Since my studio is in a residential area I can’t record live drums there – but my equipment is portable so I plan to set it up in our rehearsal room and get the drums tracked there.

I’ll let you know how this plan works next time.

I’m pretty keen on getting the right flow to the new album. We’ll kick it off with Hook In My Heart – it’s a song we’ve played live, already made a video for and has some success with in that it’s reached number 37 on the UK's original weekly unsigned chart.

Next up will be another song we’ve played live, Question of Love, so we keep that recognisable rock edge to the start of the album before we branch out a little. We’ll go via Nothing Is More, which is more a travelling band kind of song, and My Revolution, which is an acoustic style track to Monsoon Rain, which is the nearest we’ll get to world music in a prog rock sort of way. Thinking about it, I’d quite like My Revolution to segue into Monsoon Rain.

We’ll put the ballad Girls Don’t Look in next I think, then I want us to go all jangly guitar on Bring On The Summer, moving through a more British sounding I Will Decide to the fast acoustic bitterness of Screw The Earth. We’ll bring the album home with the anthemic Sound Of Rock, followed by the lush strings of the rock ballad As I’ve Come To Know and finishing with a bouncy version of Season Of The Rose, another song we’ve been playing live.

So, now it’s time to take this plan to the band, and the rehearsal room, and try it out to see if it works! I’ll update you on this next time.