This is my part of the web site where I am happy to share the production process involved for getting these tracks to where they are today.

As we have worked on each track I soon discovered that the end result did not touch on professional recording quality, this made me angry because no matter how good the music was itself, our recordings would amount to nothing more than a demo which would still need to be recorded in a professional envirornment and then mastered (not cheap).

Read Between The Lines

When we began reocording Read Between The Lines, I wanted an overall sound that at least stood up against our local recording studios. We had just aquired a Rode Valve mic for vocals and some other instruments and a good sound card with a dedicated pre-amp.

Robin had a string of songs to record so we decided that we would record Read Between The Lines as it was a powerful song when played acoustically. It was a good way of gaining experience with the new equipment while keeping things simple - we only needed 3 Instruments; piano, acoustic guitar & vocals

Daniel played a double track recording of the acoustic guitars with great skill, and we processed these with a basic "Pan Plan" and a slight morphing delay to fill the space.

Robin's piano playing, coupled with the strong acoustic guitar complemented each other and felt right. The vocals were performed by a singer called Jamie Goddard. His vocals were backed up by Robin - the first ever recording of his voice

I listened and analysed the track, and built a mix based on consistensy through out each section of the track on each individual instrument, I then brought each intrument layer together making sure the volume was balanced throughout.

The last stages to complete this would be to up the volume of the track to 0db by using a multiband compressor plug-in to up the overall volume of the track (db.), we then used a tool called T-Racks to attempt a generic master.

The overall finsh was better than we had hoped for, it certainly sounded better than recordings in studios that cost around £20 an hour.

Saturday

This track was a totally different ball game altogther. Robin had written this individual song on his piano and I liked the upbeat pace of it. We now had a song to which we could add instruments galore. A nine month project while still working a full time job, would teach us how to pull new instruments together; Drums, Violin, Strings, Bass guitar, electric guitars and Robin performing lead vocals for the first time.

The drums were the starting point. We purchased a drum kit sample cd which had multiple hits per key, the realism and dynamics compared to real kits was second to none. If you have a good keyboard at home you will know all the sample based drums are fantastic, but the standard kits (real kits) lack any realisim and depth simply because when a real drummer plays, the dynamics of the sound is different every single hit.

This sample based kit played a different sample of the drummer depending on how hard you hit the key, the cymbals also sounded better. Robin scored the complete thing with a pre-configured arrangement in mind.

The next stages included the piano and strings, robin spent a great deal of time on this score the strings formulate at the finale of track complementing the piano structure.

This now left the vocals; this was the first time Robin and I spent producing his lead vocal performance, unfortunatly for me Robin is pitch perfect, so every section had to be performed without any issues with tuning.

At this stage, Daniel did not have the time we needed to spend recording the guitars (although he plays lead at the end). This is when John Gardner stepped in, my good friend who had a mutual interest in making music. He had not picked up the guitar in a long time, and felt compelled to contribitute on the track. After two weeks we had recorded our first electric guitars through a device called Guitar Port. We had no electric amp, but Guitar Port allowed us to simulate real guitar amps. We recorded the acoustic guitars through the rode mic.

Following a stag doo (Yo Joe) invloving a paint balling session, I met someone from my old school called Alex Gow, and after the 6 hour shooting frenzy I heard Alex's friend Dave Allen (aka Violin Dave) mentioning that he was a musician. Dave and I got talking and he popped round for a listen to what we where doing, this was followed by an intuative recording session. Using the Rode mic again we captured Dave's amazing playing abiltiy as he added a real signature to the track with the violin.

After all this was mixed down, it sounded terrible, once turned up everything either distorted or could not be defined. Even if you turned up the volume on each intstrument section it was still really muddy. There was no way of prioritising the instruments with each other, and the end section suffered severely, I honestly did not know what to do.

A couple of nights later my mum and I were talking about music in the charts, I mentioned The Thrills latest track sounded a lot like ELO. To my suprise this prompted Mum to buy me their latest album - Lets Bottle Bohemema-, I sat down that evening to listen; I was hooked, it only took utill the second verse before I moved over to the audio station with the ear phones. The musicianship and quality was outstanding, and the amazing thing was that the instrument structure was almost identical to our track.

I spent a week analizing the music & production, it taught me about dynamic panning and the priority of the instruments. This led me to breaking all the instruments into there own space in the stereo spectrum. It had now cleaned up almost 80% of the instrument damage and gave the mix a whole new clarity - wow! with automation I was able to change not only what instrument was leading, but move them around each other in the stereo space.

The Thrills album also taught me how the intruments in solos changed with an increase in the frequency band. I started using a spectrascope on all intruments to map where frequencies started, the peak frequency and where they ended. I found that the electric guitars, strings, piano and vocals clashed, so I simply used an EQ plug-in to trim some of those frequencies down without effecting the core of the sound.

The result was beyond our hopes and dreams and it sounds particually good on earphones.

Here Comes Charlie

This track came like a thunder bolt, before we knew what had happened it was written, recorded and on CD. I took all the lessons from before, and streamlined them.

We started with a Guitar riff that John had played and we had recorded. Robin had recorded the piano totally seperately, and then put them together. Next was the task of programming the drums, so I thought I'd leave this to Robin. He had invested in a new drum sample set -Scarbee Drums. They had been carefully created with over 5000 individual drum hits for a kit. Robin was in his element and he built the score, exactly how a live drummer should play it. following this came the keyboards and SFX.

We knew that this track would need electric guitars, but this time I wanted them to come from a real amp, so we went to a friends garage studio to record them. Using a standard SM57 dynamic mic we cranked it up and had to record the lot in 4 hours, John had no time to practice; the pressure was on.

After the four hours we took the computer back, and went through what had been recorded, Robin spent time arranging the best takes. After a quick mix down it sounded good, but again we had similar problems as Saturday, no clarity.

I mixed the tracks down individually, followed by serious panning dynamics and EQ. The qualtiy of audio was second to none. I used Bon Jovi and Keane to reference for mastering. I managed to 0db the track with a new technique and I trust you will agree makes tha quality comaparable with the most modest of low range studios.

We will try to make the overall quality and experience of the music as close to professional studio recording, but at the end of the day it is a bit like a black art, its mysterious and there is no real handbook to follow for intructions. You can only make what you feel sounds good.