Hair, Wear and Vanity Fair

Working on a band image. Tight T-shirts in black and dark trousers with a gleaming belt. As we all have weedy little arms, we've gone for the long-sleeved. To picture Dave with a new hair-style, we used the faithful Photoshop to bodge one on from the Internet (see picture). Cool dude.

The deadline to finish the songs and have them up on the net is approaching us like a piano dropped from the tenth floor. 7am starts (actually just one) and working through the nights, we may just do it.

Thinking about means of advertising. Having our band plastered on plectrums, pens, diaries, mp3 players, balloons, Frisbees, T-shirts, bottle openers, beermats and even condoms. Need to get the bass drum skin done, too.

Finally finished mixing and mastering our first tune Tracks, which has been stewing through Cubase for over a year. It's changed more times than Muhammed Ali's radio station. Kieran from fellow band Stone Soul has come in for an evening to play about with some ideas for Gypo Jack, the second of three songs we need to finish by tomorrow. I wonder if I can get hold of Bernard's watch on eBay...

Music of the Night

This week we have had a number of late night sessions. I put pen to paper and written some decent lyrics for the currently named '5/4 song idea'. Catchy title? No. As well as lyric and melody ideas Pete and Dave have been trying to work on some simple harmonies (see video below). Work on Tracks continues. We have set ourselves until Saturday to complete the mixes.

In the mad rush to get the songs sounding great we took a bit of time off on Saturday to work with a musician called John H. He's got a song called 'Feelin' It.' It's a great song so we are doing our best to not ruin it in the recording. I've decided to take a real back seat on this one and just steer the project from behind the computer. Dave is on piano and Pete on drums. We will be doing some more work to this song tomorrow.

Barn the Bass

Barney, an old maths tutee, has agreed to fill in the bass-shaped hole for our gigs over the summer until he starts his A-Levels. It's only when we try to teach our songs that we realise how bloody weird they are. He's come up with some funky funky lines that we'll be recording over the next few days.

I've spent a couple of days on my own re-recording some drums for the hellish mess of a project that is Tracks. Out with the synthetic snare, in with the real deal.

It has become clear that my memory is comparable to that of an Alzheimic goldfish. After forgetting tonight's plans, Dave asked me to look up at the ceiling and to tell everyone what T-shirt I put on this morning. I knew it had long sleeves, the rest was pure guesswork. Got it wrong. It didn't help that I had also worn it for a few days in a row. Omega 3, anybody? Or is it 4..

Wasp extermination

A steadily growing swarm of wasps developed outside the studio window, so we got a ladder and sprayed a jet of water into the gateway hole in the soffit. No change. We threw balls at it, which flew over the house. I went to collect them and got talking to a 'well fit' primary school teacher called Sonya. By the time I got back, Dave and Marc had Sellotaped a wasp spray to a pole and, while up the ladder, used a broom to spray it. They fell out of the sky like Icarus - HAVE IT!

You're So Vain... Happy Birthday Dave!

This week we had our pictures taken, as part of the ongoing work to build our website. This was the first time we have had someone in to take photos of us. I found it hard not to feel awkward with a camera pressed up against my face. I could sense the feeling in my facial expression, similar to that of a dog's when it's aware its owner is watching while it takes a dump. I digress.



















Our initial first draft of the website was Flash-based. After spending endless hours learning what Flash was and how to use it we managed to build a rudimentary site, which... sort of worked. However, after lengthy discussions and ideas we decided to avoid using the format of other bands' website designs. Instead we came to the conclusion that we should steer clear of over-the-top, Flash-based consumer propaganda. Re-inventing the standard 'official band website' design was an atypical Flags challenge. So we had our logo redesigned and Dave and Amy Ricketts (from MoreGood Design) began working on a much more simple HTML site.

Getting tight for live performances is one, if not THE most important target for us to reach. To be able to do this we need to be able to hear each other through our headphones. So far Dave and I have hidden away in the control room, away from Pete's dangerously loud drums. This allowed us to have individually tailored mixes at comfortable levels. There are two down sides to this set up:

• We can't see each other or communicate properly. Dave has to use a major or minor chord to express his positive or negative feelings. Pete has to go through a lengthy process of yes/no questions using a snare to answer 'yes' and the kick for 'no'. As you may gather setting up this way is crap.

• Pete gets lonely and depressed.
  

A set of headphones with high attenuation (blocking out a lot of sound) would allow us to play in the same room by cutting out the drums. We tried out a pair of Direct Sound Extreme Isolation headphones. £80 later, we found the only extreme these registered on was the crap-scale. They had the same attenuation as our £25 Sony headphones. Back to the shop with them. The Beyerdynamics Dt150s have been recommended globally by music shops and studios.

On Wednesday it was Dave's 22nd birthday. Unfortunately his present from Pete and I still hasn't arrived. Fingers crossed that it will arrive tomorrow.

After Pete's phenomenal cock-up frying fish fingers, we hope tonight's chicken fajitas will have less of a carbon aftertaste. Then poker with Palo Nutini's iTunes festival gig in the background, which I went to see last week.

Slave to the Master

So we finished writing and recording Daylight Robbery. We spent absolutely ages mixing it on our brand new Genelec 8020a studio monitors, potentially some of the best monitors money can buy for a control room as small as ours. When we first got them a couple of weeks ago, we were amazed with the detail and brightness of the sound, even hearing the breath on some Mraz tracks that were previously inaudible. Having worked on a pair of bog-standard Sony Hifi monitors for the last year, the difference was huge.

We got to the mastering stage last week, and spent a couple of hours playing around with T-Racks3, Izotope and the Oxford plugins to produce a brilliant sounding master. So brilliant in fact that when we compared it to Karma Police and Violet Hill, it sounded richer, warmer, fuller and generally better. How had we, with limited equipment and experience, produced a track that sounded better than Radiohead?

Well our sense of achievement rapidly dissolved into a pitiful mess or sorrow and depression when we listened to our master on a normal Hifi. It sounded muddy, over-compressed and had a stereo image as wide as our punctured egos. It was at that point that we realised why the Coldplay and Radiohead tracks sounded worse than ours; their tracks were mixed and mastered for the Hifi, whereas ours was done for the high-end studio monitors, a listening environment experienced by almost nobody.

The moral of the story? Always listen to a mixdown on the track you're working on on different systems throughout the mixing process. Don't wait until you've spent weeks mixing and mastering it, otherwise you'll be in for a nasty surprise.