Pocket Rocket in the studio: Days 1&2

Day One:

Orpheus is a reasonably-priced little basement studio in Shoreditch, run by long-haired Pantera-loving
sound engineer Richard Campbell. Richard is also a drummer, so he has a drum kit set up, and miked up, permanently in the live room, which is a bonus and saves us a lot of time on Day One.

We're big fans of recording to click-tracks and having our songs tight to the beat, so Nigel has been practising playing to a click over the last few weeks. The beauty of recording to a click and using Logic recording software is that Richard is able to touch up any slipped beats at the end. The result is a perfect foundation on which to construct four driving rock songs.

We begin by recording Nigel's drums and Mike's bass simultaneously, while I play and record a guide guitar and vocal track. I'm in a vocal booth and the lads are in the live-room together. We all require a slightly different headphone mix but once we are all happy, off we go.
Your Doom is a little challenging but Nigel wants to record his hardest parts first. Mike and I wonder why we don't start with something a little easier, but once we get YD down, we get Imagine This, Give The Boy A Chance and Banging Your Head down more quickly. I play very little guide guitar and mostly sing to give cues to various parts of the songs.

Mike decides at the end that he wants to re-do his bass lines once my guitar parts are down, which makes sense. But we have enough for Lex and me to work with on Day 2. Richard spends an hour and a half at the end of the session, 'tidying up' the drums, in preparation for Day Two.


Day Two:

Lex and I get together to record our guitar parts. I spend the first three and half hours of the session recording double-tracked rhythm guitar parts using the amp-simulation software, and standing behind Richard and the mixing desk. My concentration starts to go at around the three hour mark and I have to work particularly hard to get through the last song.

Lex plays lead guitar for 3 hours. He plays my Fender Strat, and uses 3 sounds from the amp simulator: he picks through verses using a clean sound with some chorus and delay, which adds an REM sound to a couple of the songs; he uses a nice crunchy sound for opening lead refrains and chugging chord patterns; and a lively classic-rock lead guitar sound for solos.
We leave the studio in high spirits. On Saturday, we will re-do the bass and record the vocals and backing vocals.