It's All Right Here, Right Now
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
This Post:
Without any time in the week just past to write anything about our final Hollows sessions I've been forced to leave it until now. But that's okay, because chances are you're reading this well in the future. Weekend before last, we finished the album in a marathon 5 day fix-patch-write-tidy-mix-master session. I did about 72 hours in those 5 days (and you don't have to work that out - it's a bit more than 14 hours a day). Rather than put each day into a separate post, it's all in one, broken chronologically.
Thursday April 13th, 2006: Piano Day
You'll recall the demo of Small Pulses I posted, which promised grand piano. I hope you remember that. On the date above, I trekked out to Organic Audio to record that grand piano. (Photos to the left). Jason had been shooting a clip the night before and forgot we were coming. Resisting the temptation to snap some shots in a square room, walls and floor covered with sheet music, was not easy. The studio was a bit of a mess, and Jason apologised profusely to which my thoughts were "I'm not paying you - why should you be worried about thousands of dollars worth of music and film gear lying around looking untidy."
The piano at Organic Audio is tucked away in a little room between the control room and studio; a room big enough to fit only the piano, a pianist and dedicated photographer. I used Jason's stereo Rode microphone 'cause it was easy and ran everything straight into the session on my laptop. He did offer for me to use his big-mother preamps but I declined (who really wants to use Neve gear anyway...?). The piano itself has a slight honk to it, which is so very real. I did have some trouble mixing it - it's been a while, lets face it, with a lot of keyboards in between - but what I have ended up with is a piano that sounds very much like a piano and not a crisp-perfect-128-note-polyphony-64-bit-multisample piano. It's uncomplicated. I also re-recorded the piano in Full Circle (which previously was a keyboard) and still had some time left. So I played the opening riff to Always Tomorrow, thinking I might be able to use it somewhere - perhaps The Shortest Of Years (but more on that a bit later). We were in and out in 2 hours.
The rest of my afternoon was back at Ugly World pulling my hair out over Sixteen Cranes and working on a little song called Hollow that I wrote way back in the time of Bardon. Hollow got to change its name on the last day of recording (but a bit more on that later, again). I have to say just now, too, that I've never had a song like Sixteen Cranes. I imagine giving birth to a fully grown man would hurt less. I'm sure I've said this before, but sometimes they just slip out (songs, not fully grown men) and sometimes they're the best - and others, like Sixteen Cranes, have to be coaxed out, and pulled out, and threatened. I don't particularly like talking about songs as separate from myself (Tori Amos is better at that than me) because they're not. If I can't manage to finish it then it's not the song's fault, I'm aware of that. It's usually me having a bad day, being lazy, bored and a little too conventional. But, people do seem to relate to the whole external thing; is why it's here.
Friday April 14th, 2006: More at Ugly World, Pre-Vanessa
This was Good Friday, but not going in for the Jesus thing I spent my day in the studio. Which is a bit make-shift at the moment. See, we've only just moved in here and getting the Brady-esque Galactic Funk vibe right in the house has taken precedence. I actually don't remember anything specific that happened on this day. I probably lined up the piano on Full Circle, and added 303 to Always Tomorrow. We'll never know. I remember being stressed about needing everything to be finished for Saturday - the only day Vanessa was available.
Yes, that's right. I spent most of the day on Hollow. This is a little out of sync, but an explanation is warranted. As I've said, I wrote Hollow years ago, when I still lived in Bardon, one night in the sunroom on the floor. I don't remember whether we had cats or not, but I had a loan of a friend's 12 string acoustic guitar. Anyway, these words were well-hippie and the original music was big and slow. See here:
Wish I Were Here (Original Demo) 637kb
Vanessa and I recorded that on the 16th of June, 2005. I'm sorry for the quality of it, I had the vocal patched incorrectly. We decided at about that time that the album should be called Hollows, and that Hollow should be the central piece (not to be confused with the piece in the centre). As the months went by, I started thinking how pop-in-a-bad-way it was to have a song called Hollow on an album called Hollows - and I didn't want to give the song too much weight because, despite still liking it a lot, I was feeling I'd grown out of the words. They are about 4 years old, after all. This amounted to the song needing a new name, which we gave it on the Saturday evening of this last recording block. We recycled Wish I Were Here - and that's how it will appear on the album. I'm not inserting a spreadsheet, but it goes something like this: We wrote a song called Hollow. I wrote a song called Wish I Were Here. I recorded a demo of Wish I Were Here. We kept the music from that, but Vanessa wrote new words prompting a name change to Bare Foot In The Grass. Wish I Were Here was sent back to just a title and some lyrics. We recorded the song we called Hollow, but needed to give it a different name (for the reasons listed above). We gave it the name Wish I Were Here. Now the lyrics which were attached to the title Wish I Were Here sit in a book and will never be used, because they're crap anyway. To the left is a graphic representation of how Manzuma works. Despite finishing Wish I Were Here on the Saturday, here's the sample now:
Wish I Were Here (Pre-Chorus & Chorus) 960kb
You can certainly hear the difference. This is becoming one of my favourite tracks on the album. It's got more energy than is usually in a Manzuma song - and it's the only one this album with any asymmeticality in its time sign. And I love the 80's guitar in the bridge. I didn't know I could play like that.
Saturday April 15th, 2006: Vanessa Day
As I said, Saturday was the only day Ness could make it. This was one of the longer days we've spent in the studio. We: recorded vocals on The Shortest of Years (after writing the vocal part), Wish I Were Here, Small Pulses. Patched up vocals on Bare Foot In The Grass, Sixteen Cranes (after writing the 3rd verse). Finished guitars on Wish I Were Here. There was a lot of talking, discussing, and I think Vanessa was ready to punch me at one point. That's all part of the experience.
The Shortest of Years is the other part of The Longest of Days. It did, in fact, work brilliantly with the piano playing the intro to Always Tomorrow. When I recorded the piano I didn't have the lyrics to The Shortest of Years on me, but as it turns out they mention the song Always Tomorrow. Works beautifully in my head, I like things like that. Here's a quick listen to how it turned out:
The Shortest of Years (Verse 2) 644kb
What you don't hear there is the intro - which incorporates me talking a lot of rubbish and a recording of our remote-controlled garage. I've said too much already.
Our session ended at about 9:30, I think. Which was late enough, I think. While we were bouncing some rough mixes we took some photos in similar fashion to the Symmetry session photos. We were joking about how this (to the left) is what recording a Manzuma album does to you. But we were really just pulling stupid faces. That's what we could be like if we were to not spread the album out over 6 months - which is something I haven't yet gloated about! Serpent took us 2 years, so we're happy and fat that this one took a quarter that time. 6 months still does seem like a very long time - and to most people it is, I'm sure some people could write and record 3 albums in that time, and they may well be as good or better, but for us, it's quick!
We left the session with Sixteen Cranes still in pieces and a "fix it tomorrow" promise, and everything else finished aside from The Longest of Days. We did try to record it on this Saturday, but it just didn't work out and Vanessa told me to do the vocals, which I did on...
Sunday April 16th, 2006: By myself, in the dark.
Another day of pulling hair and teeth with Sixteen Cranes left me frustrated but finished. I had had a nap in the middle of the day, just 'cause I felt like I was crumbling and we weren't going to get it finished. After my nap, and a coffee, I got all Eye of the Tiger and boxed it into shape, complete with vinyl fuzz and whole lot of extensions.
Sixteen Cranes (Verse 2, Chorus 2) 832kb
This is a similar spot to the sample I posted a while back. You can hear the difference in Vanessa's vocal, oh yes you can. This was one of those tracks that consistently gave the "You are running out of CPU power. Remove some plugins." error. On Vanessa's verse vocal it was a combination of compression, EQ, Waves Lo-Fi, short mono delay and reverb. I resisted the temptation to run all that through an aux and add more. You wish I did, don't you.
The Longest of Days was the last thing I recorded on this album. I'd recorded 2 previous versions. The first was music-box and switching-clicks on the Hammond. The second was huge and lush empty-warehouse sounding with music-box at end. The third was sort of both:
The Longest of Days (Verse 1) 716kb
I recorded my Whirly against the original clicking of the switches on the Hammond and laid a vocal on, with similar effect settings to Vanessa's vocal on The Shortest of Years. Coupled with her talking (to balance mine on the corresponding song), it makes for a nice interlude. I wanted to get pissed when I'd finished, but had to mix the next day so decided it was best to save myself.
Monday April 17th, 2006: Mix
It's all blending in to one long day now, despite having broken it into pieces for you already. I'll wrap this up as quickly as I can. My focus during mixing was mainly to not compromise. I was disappointed with some elements of the mix on Serpent, and didn't want the same for this album. One thing I really wanted was a clean, deep, tight bass. Which is what I got. On Always Tomorrow the bass line can really be heard. I don't remember pulling any tricks while I was mixing. I just remember it taking a much shorter amount of time than I'd expected. I mean, we're so good that everything was pretty much done.
(The photo is of where I mixed the album. I dragged everything upstairs so I could see the mountains and the pool.) The most intricate work was done when I was mastering it on Monday night. Now, I know that mastering is an incredibly specialised field that requires specialised tools and years of experience and doing it ourselves isn't really to prove anything, it's just easier. Regardless of whether I've done it right or not, I've still mastered it, okay. And I'm happy with it, which is the most important thing. The whole structure of this album is based on a love of palindromes. As best we could, the album is symmetrical - without simply running the first half backwards to make it the second half of the album. Each song has a corresponding song on the other side of the album. Track 1 corresponds to track 11, track 2 to track 10 and so on until you get to Ash, & Blown Away (which at track 6, sits right in the middle). Each song is exactly the same length as it's equal on the other side of Ash, and (stop me if I've already explained this) in the middle of Ash there is a short section which does run forwards then backwards, and this is the exact half way point, not only of the song, but the album. Get it? It was fucken difficult. I had to not think in seconds, but hundredths of seconds, when sequencing the songs. And they all flow beautifully, with the links and segues having more impact than anything we've done previously.
My computer nearly packed it in during the mastering. Could not cope. It took about 5 hours to convert the final mixdown, which is way too long for there to be nothing up. On Tuesday morning I split the session into the individual tracks, burnt a few discs and got everything on the drive off and onto an external disc. I burnt 2 DVD backups of the album and ran a defrag on the main drive. All that was just in time. The studio computer has now, after 4 years of loyal service, decided it needs a break. It's stuffed I think, won't even boot up properly. How lucky is that! Not to mention that if we were still working on the album (assuming the computer was still ticking away) we've had 4 days now of a boy jack hammering a new retaining wall just outside the studio.
That's not the end of it though. I'll be posting more about the artwork and the rest of the process as we go along. And on that note - like I said before - if anyone has any ideas on artwork then they should email me, we'd like for some other people to be involved in this.
Without any time in the week just past to write anything about our final Hollows sessions I've been forced to leave it until now. But that's okay, because chances are you're reading this well in the future. Weekend before last, we finished the album in a marathon 5 day fix-patch-write-tidy-mix-master session. I did about 72 hours in those 5 days (and you don't have to work that out - it's a bit more than 14 hours a day). Rather than put each day into a separate post, it's all in one, broken chronologically.
Thursday April 13th, 2006: Piano Day
You'll recall the demo of Small Pulses I posted, which promised grand piano. I hope you remember that. On the date above, I trekked out to Organic Audio to record that grand piano. (Photos to the left). Jason had been shooting a clip the night before and forgot we were coming. Resisting the temptation to snap some shots in a square room, walls and floor covered with sheet music, was not easy. The studio was a bit of a mess, and Jason apologised profusely to which my thoughts were "I'm not paying you - why should you be worried about thousands of dollars worth of music and film gear lying around looking untidy."The piano at Organic Audio is tucked away in a little room between the control room and studio; a room big enough to fit only the piano, a pianist and dedicated photographer. I used Jason's stereo Rode microphone 'cause it was easy and ran everything straight into the session on my laptop. He did offer for me to use his big-mother preamps but I declined (who really wants to use Neve gear anyway...?). The piano itself has a slight honk to it, which is so very real. I did have some trouble mixing it - it's been a while, lets face it, with a lot of keyboards in between - but what I have ended up with is a piano that sounds very much like a piano and not a crisp-perfect-128-note-polyphony-64-bit-multisample piano. It's uncomplicated. I also re-recorded the piano in Full Circle (which previously was a keyboard) and still had some time left. So I played the opening riff to Always Tomorrow, thinking I might be able to use it somewhere - perhaps The Shortest Of Years (but more on that a bit later). We were in and out in 2 hours.
The rest of my afternoon was back at Ugly World pulling my hair out over Sixteen Cranes and working on a little song called Hollow that I wrote way back in the time of Bardon. Hollow got to change its name on the last day of recording (but a bit more on that later, again). I have to say just now, too, that I've never had a song like Sixteen Cranes. I imagine giving birth to a fully grown man would hurt less. I'm sure I've said this before, but sometimes they just slip out (songs, not fully grown men) and sometimes they're the best - and others, like Sixteen Cranes, have to be coaxed out, and pulled out, and threatened. I don't particularly like talking about songs as separate from myself (Tori Amos is better at that than me) because they're not. If I can't manage to finish it then it's not the song's fault, I'm aware of that. It's usually me having a bad day, being lazy, bored and a little too conventional. But, people do seem to relate to the whole external thing; is why it's here.Friday April 14th, 2006: More at Ugly World, Pre-Vanessa
This was Good Friday, but not going in for the Jesus thing I spent my day in the studio. Which is a bit make-shift at the moment. See, we've only just moved in here and getting the Brady-esque Galactic Funk vibe right in the house has taken precedence. I actually don't remember anything specific that happened on this day. I probably lined up the piano on Full Circle, and added 303 to Always Tomorrow. We'll never know. I remember being stressed about needing everything to be finished for Saturday - the only day Vanessa was available.
Yes, that's right. I spent most of the day on Hollow. This is a little out of sync, but an explanation is warranted. As I've said, I wrote Hollow years ago, when I still lived in Bardon, one night in the sunroom on the floor. I don't remember whether we had cats or not, but I had a loan of a friend's 12 string acoustic guitar. Anyway, these words were well-hippie and the original music was big and slow. See here:
Wish I Were Here (Original Demo) 637kbVanessa and I recorded that on the 16th of June, 2005. I'm sorry for the quality of it, I had the vocal patched incorrectly. We decided at about that time that the album should be called Hollows, and that Hollow should be the central piece (not to be confused with the piece in the centre). As the months went by, I started thinking how pop-in-a-bad-way it was to have a song called Hollow on an album called Hollows - and I didn't want to give the song too much weight because, despite still liking it a lot, I was feeling I'd grown out of the words. They are about 4 years old, after all. This amounted to the song needing a new name, which we gave it on the Saturday evening of this last recording block. We recycled Wish I Were Here - and that's how it will appear on the album. I'm not inserting a spreadsheet, but it goes something like this: We wrote a song called Hollow. I wrote a song called Wish I Were Here. I recorded a demo of Wish I Were Here. We kept the music from that, but Vanessa wrote new words prompting a name change to Bare Foot In The Grass. Wish I Were Here was sent back to just a title and some lyrics. We recorded the song we called Hollow, but needed to give it a different name (for the reasons listed above). We gave it the name Wish I Were Here. Now the lyrics which were attached to the title Wish I Were Here sit in a book and will never be used, because they're crap anyway. To the left is a graphic representation of how Manzuma works. Despite finishing Wish I Were Here on the Saturday, here's the sample now:Wish I Were Here (Pre-Chorus & Chorus) 960kbYou can certainly hear the difference. This is becoming one of my favourite tracks on the album. It's got more energy than is usually in a Manzuma song - and it's the only one this album with any asymmeticality in its time sign. And I love the 80's guitar in the bridge. I didn't know I could play like that.
Saturday April 15th, 2006: Vanessa Day
As I said, Saturday was the only day Ness could make it. This was one of the longer days we've spent in the studio. We: recorded vocals on The Shortest of Years (after writing the vocal part), Wish I Were Here, Small Pulses. Patched up vocals on Bare Foot In The Grass, Sixteen Cranes (after writing the 3rd verse). Finished guitars on Wish I Were Here. There was a lot of talking, discussing, and I think Vanessa was ready to punch me at one point. That's all part of the experience.
The Shortest of Years is the other part of The Longest of Days. It did, in fact, work brilliantly with the piano playing the intro to Always Tomorrow. When I recorded the piano I didn't have the lyrics to The Shortest of Years on me, but as it turns out they mention the song Always Tomorrow. Works beautifully in my head, I like things like that. Here's a quick listen to how it turned out:
The Shortest of Years (Verse 2) 644kbWhat you don't hear there is the intro - which incorporates me talking a lot of rubbish and a recording of our remote-controlled garage. I've said too much already.
Our session ended at about 9:30, I think. Which was late enough, I think. While we were bouncing some rough mixes we took some photos in similar fashion to the Symmetry session photos. We were joking about how this (to the left) is what recording a Manzuma album does to you. But we were really just pulling stupid faces. That's what we could be like if we were to not spread the album out over 6 months - which is something I haven't yet gloated about! Serpent took us 2 years, so we're happy and fat that this one took a quarter that time. 6 months still does seem like a very long time - and to most people it is, I'm sure some people could write and record 3 albums in that time, and they may well be as good or better, but for us, it's quick!We left the session with Sixteen Cranes still in pieces and a "fix it tomorrow" promise, and everything else finished aside from The Longest of Days. We did try to record it on this Saturday, but it just didn't work out and Vanessa told me to do the vocals, which I did on...
Sunday April 16th, 2006: By myself, in the dark.
Another day of pulling hair and teeth with Sixteen Cranes left me frustrated but finished. I had had a nap in the middle of the day, just 'cause I felt like I was crumbling and we weren't going to get it finished. After my nap, and a coffee, I got all Eye of the Tiger and boxed it into shape, complete with vinyl fuzz and whole lot of extensions.
Sixteen Cranes (Verse 2, Chorus 2) 832kbThis is a similar spot to the sample I posted a while back. You can hear the difference in Vanessa's vocal, oh yes you can. This was one of those tracks that consistently gave the "You are running out of CPU power. Remove some plugins." error. On Vanessa's verse vocal it was a combination of compression, EQ, Waves Lo-Fi, short mono delay and reverb. I resisted the temptation to run all that through an aux and add more. You wish I did, don't you.
The Longest of Days was the last thing I recorded on this album. I'd recorded 2 previous versions. The first was music-box and switching-clicks on the Hammond. The second was huge and lush empty-warehouse sounding with music-box at end. The third was sort of both:
The Longest of Days (Verse 1) 716kbI recorded my Whirly against the original clicking of the switches on the Hammond and laid a vocal on, with similar effect settings to Vanessa's vocal on The Shortest of Years. Coupled with her talking (to balance mine on the corresponding song), it makes for a nice interlude. I wanted to get pissed when I'd finished, but had to mix the next day so decided it was best to save myself.
Monday April 17th, 2006: Mix
It's all blending in to one long day now, despite having broken it into pieces for you already. I'll wrap this up as quickly as I can. My focus during mixing was mainly to not compromise. I was disappointed with some elements of the mix on Serpent, and didn't want the same for this album. One thing I really wanted was a clean, deep, tight bass. Which is what I got. On Always Tomorrow the bass line can really be heard. I don't remember pulling any tricks while I was mixing. I just remember it taking a much shorter amount of time than I'd expected. I mean, we're so good that everything was pretty much done.
(The photo is of where I mixed the album. I dragged everything upstairs so I could see the mountains and the pool.) The most intricate work was done when I was mastering it on Monday night. Now, I know that mastering is an incredibly specialised field that requires specialised tools and years of experience and doing it ourselves isn't really to prove anything, it's just easier. Regardless of whether I've done it right or not, I've still mastered it, okay. And I'm happy with it, which is the most important thing. The whole structure of this album is based on a love of palindromes. As best we could, the album is symmetrical - without simply running the first half backwards to make it the second half of the album. Each song has a corresponding song on the other side of the album. Track 1 corresponds to track 11, track 2 to track 10 and so on until you get to Ash, & Blown Away (which at track 6, sits right in the middle). Each song is exactly the same length as it's equal on the other side of Ash, and (stop me if I've already explained this) in the middle of Ash there is a short section which does run forwards then backwards, and this is the exact half way point, not only of the song, but the album. Get it? It was fucken difficult. I had to not think in seconds, but hundredths of seconds, when sequencing the songs. And they all flow beautifully, with the links and segues having more impact than anything we've done previously.My computer nearly packed it in during the mastering. Could not cope. It took about 5 hours to convert the final mixdown, which is way too long for there to be nothing up. On Tuesday morning I split the session into the individual tracks, burnt a few discs and got everything on the drive off and onto an external disc. I burnt 2 DVD backups of the album and ran a defrag on the main drive. All that was just in time. The studio computer has now, after 4 years of loyal service, decided it needs a break. It's stuffed I think, won't even boot up properly. How lucky is that! Not to mention that if we were still working on the album (assuming the computer was still ticking away) we've had 4 days now of a boy jack hammering a new retaining wall just outside the studio.
That's not the end of it though. I'll be posting more about the artwork and the rest of the process as we go along. And on that note - like I said before - if anyone has any ideas on artwork then they should email me, we'd like for some other people to be involved in this.
- posted by Tim at 1:20 PM -
Hey,
The manner in which you recite your various activities reminds me of a flow reminiscent of Chuck Palahnuik. I feel [perhaps because I am also Australian] the Humanity behind your trials and victories. And I feel your emotion.
Or perhaps I empathise because of a latent attraction I felt for the male member of this enigmatic group I know only as Time, an attraction without sense, end of chance.
Bloody electro-chemicals.
By 
, at
April 25, 2006 10:01 PM
Leave a comment of your very own
