Hey good people,

Having recovered sufficiently to perform even simple tasks, we thought a blog documenting the recording process was in order.

Sat the 19th of May saw us travelling through (minus the bold Mr Easton to guide us) to Hamilton, and Gargleblast Studios to record with the legend that is Andy Miller. Keen-eyed readers will note I said ‘without’ Mr Easton at the helm, so inevitably we got lost, and our early start turned into an almost-late situation.

 

Thankfully, we eventually found the studio, and manager Sean and Andy were there to greet us, and have a brief chat before we got underway.

 

A brief run thru of our recording process (at the risk of boring you lot), was to set up the drums in the live room, all mic’d up, and have the rest of us in the control room, me (chris) on guitar and vocals, Greg on his guitar, Mike on bass and Mr Gibson on shaker.

 

 

We would play through a song, whilst recording the drums, and the rest of us would be providing a ‘guide’ for when we came to re-do our individual parts. Because many of the songs begin purely with acoustic picking, timing was going to be an issue. Mr Gibsons shaker would provide a constant ‘time-keeper’ during the quieter parts of the songs.

 

Andy was a little unsure of using this process, and an electrical ‘click track’ was advised, but he thought it worthwhile to at least try a quick 1 song run-through to see how we fared.

 

 

One quick performance of The Mines of Spennymoor, and the click track was discarded, leaving a relieved (and hopefully impressed) Andy, and a very pleased group of Winters.

Graeme played faultlessly through every track, and we quickly had the drums finalised.

 

 

He then went outside to smoke awhile and muse on his performance.

 

Next up was Michael. He quickly tuned up his beloved Fender bass, using the much shared tuning pedal of Mr Gregory Jones, and laid down his parts in a record 14 minutes.

 

 

 

We then stopped for lunch, the best choice of the day being the huge container of mac-and-cheese-and-chips, purchased by our hungry percussionist.

 

 

Last up for day 1 was Mr Gibson. A perfectionist at heart, he had been practicing his press-snare rolls, and quickly had The Hangmans Chorus sounding epic-ly huge. Andy also let us know it was the best press-roll he had ever recorded in these hallowed studios.  A quick change of microphone set up and a cahon appearing in the live room, and The Mines of Spennymoor was next to recieve the Gibson treatment.

 

 

 

A plethora of shakers, steel bars, blocks, cymbals, mallets, guiros, bongos and cowbells later, Mr Gibson was finished.

We had reached our allocated studio time, so we packed our stuff up, loaded the cars, tidied our leavings of foodstuff and drink containers, thanked Andy, and headed home to ready ourselves for day 2.

 

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more studio antics.

Chris.

 

Blog 2 coming soon…….