Jesus, first post since July! Fucking hell, how lazy am I… In fact this is the first post of any real significance since April!
So, what the hell have I been up to for the past 8 months you may ask… good question…
Well, during the summer I actually put our own recording to one side while I recorded a few tracks with our good pals Slugbait. They wanted to get three songs down to go on a split release with another band, so I was happy to oblige. It ended up taking all summer what with conflicting work schedules and all the usual crap that gets in the way of making music, but by October I had three mixes that the lads were happy with – one of which can be heard on their bandcamp.
In the meantime, the band they were meant to release the split with pulled out (possibly because I took so damn long to mix it :eek:), so they were now looking for someone else to do the other side – did I mention this is being released on cassette? No? Well, it is. And I can now reveal that the other side of that tape will be taken over by none other than Stanton’s Grave! “Huzzah!” I hear you shout…
Of course this meant pulling the finger out and getting our own damn recordings finished! We decided that since the ‘Bait were doing 3 songs, we’d do likewise, although our 3 songs will be considerably shorter…
Guess what songs we decided to use? That’s right – the very three for which we had already completed the drum tracks! Why? Cos I’m fucking lazy, that’s why! 😎 Although this did mean I had to do some pretty heavy editing on Shut Up… because the recorded version is just too damn fast – we’re pretty much all having trouble laying down our tracks for it (I’m sure Dave will buck that trend)…
Anyway, once I’d managed that, we were able to start getting everyone else’s tracks down. I figured I’d already done OK on A New Hope last spring, so first I tackled the guitars for TV Zombie to get it more in line with how it’s done live now (i.e. me not playing during the first or second verse), then I went to lay down some new guitars for Shut Up…
It was at this point that I decided to play around with some different mics and tones, so I recorded my tracks via DI: this way I could reamp the guitars and fuck around with the mics and amp settings while the tracks were playing (while wearing ear protection obviously!). After a couple of days I figured I’d gotten something worth using so I moved on to vocals.
Well, I was already happy with the vox I’d done for TV Zombie last year, and for A New Hope back in April, so really I just needed to do Shut Up And Eat Your Freedom. This was probably the only part of that song where we didn’t have much difficulty 😛
So finally, all my tracks were done (or so I figured at the time – more on that later). I was time to call in the rest of the lads. Dan went first – he came down one Saturday night and we got things wrapped up in just a few hours. As with Eoin and myself, Shut Up… took the longest – about 10 takes (or more) over 2 hours! This is partly because, as I’ve said, the version we’ve got on record is a lot faster than we normally play it (we laid the drums over the old demo version as opposed to playing a completely new version – bad call on my part I guess…), but it could also have been because of some possibly screwy edits when I pasted the drum tracks together. Either way, we got there in the end. After that, A New Hope and TV Zombie were a snap – two takes each, about 20 minutes altogether 😀
Since then, I’ve been waiting for Dave to get a chance to come out here, but as with the Slugbait recording, work life keeps throwing spanners in the works. Hopefully sometime over the christmas break he can make it out here to lay down his guitars, then we’ll hopefully all get together to throw down some backing vocals of some sort. That’s the plan anyway…
While I’ve been waiting, I’ve started working on some basic rough mixes with the parts that I’ve got, and I decided I didn’t really like the guitar tone for A New Hope or Shut Up. It just sounds too thin or something, even with bass tracks in there to beef up the sound. I know I gotta leave space for Senior’s guitars (which will probably be massive :P), but I don’t want to be down on record as having a weedy guitar tone. Which is why, last night and this morning (10 Dec 2011) I decided to go back and do it again! I’m much happier with the results I’ve gotten now. I also decided to beef up the heavy outro on TV Zombie just for the craic, since I haven’t used my Danelectro Fab Tone in years!
Anyway, that’s the story so far. I realise this post has been fairly light on the technical detail, but I wanted to let y’all know what’s going on in the world of SG first – in the next few posts I’ll get into the details of how most of the above mentioned work was accomplished.
Hopefully it’ll be sooner than 6 months…
Ta ta for now…
STANTON'S GRAVE 