Waiting days...

Soo we are waiting for the tracks to be mixed so that the new recordings can start. Have we been doing nothing at all then? No way, we've had two great gigs!

Saturday a super cool gig at the Rock&Trolls festival in Leuze-en-Hainaut! Great location, blasting sound and enthusiastic crowd. We love "La Wallonie"! We say it every time but it always occurs to us that the organisation of a show is always a little bit better in the French speaking part of our country. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that they don't have the overkill of a show every weekend, so when they do something they rather do it good. And as a band, you notice that...

Yesterday it was the big "De Moens en Vounckx birthday show" at jh De Klinker in Aarschot. Great lineup, Funeral Pyre, Second Base, Rovic and Homer. No way that could go wrong! And it bloody hell didn't. We all had a great time!! Nice job birthday boys, same place next year???

Day 4 and 5: the click track, more guitars, the vocals and mixing time

Okay I skipped a day to blog. Not that it was all my fault, didn't have internet when I woke up day 5 so couldn't blog on day 4... and afterwards I had to sing... But no prob I'll give you an update on what we did these 2 days in the studio.

Day 4 was mostly about the guitars. We Joris, Jimmy and I started early in the morning with setting up the guitars and looking for some cool sounds for our songs. We finetuned Joris his guitar sound and made sure he could bust some balls hitting his rocking chords! When Luc arrived we immediately started with the recording of Jimmy's guitar. Like we were getting used this didn't quite go as easy as planned. But hey, we want to work hard to get it as good as we can! At about 9 in the evening, Joris could start with his first guitar parts. Some songs were recorded but the rest was for our final day...

Day 5 started with Joris his final guitar riffs. Jimmy also did some final tweekings from some riffs and then we had a long listen to the whole tracks. We ended with Sabine and me doing a pilot of our vocals so Luc can start with the mixing of the tracks we have so far.

Looking back: we could say we started recording with not enough rehearsals to actually play our songs without effort. Thanks to Luc we all fell that we were reaching a new level in music playing. That was looking back the most rewarding thing of these first 5 days of studio... we learned how to operate and play as a rocking machine instead of 6 people playing together. Have we arrived at that rocking level? Hell no! But from now on we have an idea how to improve our playing. On both a live rocking but also a recording level.

So for now, Luc is going to mix the tracks and then we hit his studio again for a complete vocal recording session.

Joris recording:

Day 3: More pain, some frustration and a bass

Some days, doesn't matter what you do, it will go wrong! Today was such a day... after recording the last parts of the drum, it was time for Joeri to take up the bass and hit the strings. Unfortunately the mighty Rickenbacker didn't quite agree... after plugging it in we noticed that there was a remarkable volume difference between the low strings and the higher strings... troubles, troubles troubles... after searching and tweaking with everything we could imagine: different cables, batteries, you name it... we decided to start the bass lines with the "Music man" bass. Not that thats not a good bass, it's in fact also a very cool instrument... but once you set you're mind on a type of sound its hard to think differently.

But well, after all the bass was recorded! Tomorrow the guitars...

Here the photo gallery of day 2 and 3! Where you see the last recordings of the drums, the bass troubles and the final recordings of the bass.

Day 2: the pain, the agony and the drums at last

Goddamit what a day! As a band when going to studio you do your best to rehearse your songs at the best possible level to make the record as tight as possible. So did we... we thought!!!! Thats why Luc tortured us for like 8 hours with click track playing 2.0. (When we ended in the rehearsing room we arrived at 1.0, but boy did he get us to 2.0 already!) So thats why we hired the guy, to make us sweat! And we liked it too!

It went that intensive and hard that Bob broke like 8 drum sticks... and we had our friend Berger from Hestia come over specially from Aarschot to bring Bob a box of spare sticks! Thanks a million to him! We owe him a big "5 euro thank you"...

After these 8 hours of playing, breaking sticks and some cursing we finally got to a point where we according to Luc, actually sounded like a band! (Yeah, the guy is full of compliments ;) )

So we started the actual recording of the drum at like 8pm... and after so much practice finished 5 songs at 11pm. So the plan? 5 more songs on the third morning, and then we start doing the guitars and the bass! We were all kinda tired so we decided to call it a day and hit the sheets... well I was kinda stubborn and stayed in the studio in my sleeping bag... owww yeah.. south park, a hot chocolate coffee... I'm easily pleased you know!

For today we have a little video fragment for you. The irritating noise you here is the click track... Imagine that for 12 hours in a row and you know why we were happy to see our beds... but you get an idea of how tight it got at the end of the day! The story continues tomorrow!