Pocket Rocket in the studio: Day 4

Day 4 is mix-day. Can we mix four songs in eight hours? Hopefully.

Nigel and I are the first to arrive, punctually at 11:00. Nigel's brings his laptop and we spend the first three to four hours in our 'green room', while sound engineer Richard works to get all the instruments and vocals sounding their best. Just before lunch at 1:30-ish, we have a mix of Imagine This, which sounds great. We break for lunch and return to work on Banging Your Head. Lex arrives mid-way through this mix, followed shortly by a flustered Michael after a stressful drive across town.

Mike wants to hear more rhythm guitar in the mixes, so we bring it up for BYH and then cross reference the IT mix which in turn has its rhythm guitar turned up in the mix. Unlike the old-fashioned all-hands-on-sound-desk way of mixing down to tape, these days all levels and EQs and effects are saved to the computer and can be brought up at anytime, so this makes any tweaks a doddle. BYH goes down in one and a half hours, including the re-tweak of IT.

Give The Boy a Chance has the added complication of a fade end that includes some lead guitar and lead vocal that needs tidying up a bit. The rest of the mix though, is fairly straight forward. We cut and paste Lex's lead part a bit, mostly to bring the best phrases forward in time so they get featured before the fade-out. The last most '80s widdly-widdly parts can be heard just as the track fades to nothing.

At nearly 6:00pm, we're against the clock but Richard seems confident we can nail the last mix in the hour or so we have left.

Your Doom is pretty straight forward too, though the intro gives us some problems. It doesn't kick-in like it does live. Unfortunately, I think this comes down to the recording; this was the first song we put down while we adjusted to playing with the click, and apart from each other. I think to the uninitiated it'll sound fine though, and we can re-mix it quite easily, if we need to.

We pay Richard, and thank him for being so great. Then we reconvene across the road at the local boozer and talk music for an hour and a half, like an enthusiastic band of twenty-one year olds.

Download the songs, or just listen to previews, here