Bad Willow In The Studio!
Hello it’s Harrison here. I’m going to tell you about what we’ve been up to. We are currently recording our debut album “I Might As Well Enjoy It” at On Track Audio in Barnstaple, Devon! This is huge news for us, we have waited a long time to hear the songs we’ve written recorded in a professional studio. Allow me to tell you how it’s going so far.
First Things First..
We’re starting with the drums. Our plan is to get a good drum take for each song and then add the other instruments later as it commonly done with recording. On the 7th of October we went into the studio for the first time with a plan of recording the drums all together with no click track whilst in the same room with us each playing our instruments. We started with our song “Here’s To You” because the day before we made changes to the structure to liven it up in all the right ways. This went well and we managed to get a take that we were happy with quite quickly. All credit to Beanz doing a great job. We then went onto “This Isn’t Me”, the funkiest song on the album. This was great fun to record although it took us more takes to get one we were happy with so this took us to the end of the day.
8th October
The next day we come back in the studio, ready to get some serious graft done. We recorded takes for “King Of The Castle”, “Bitching Hour” and “Nightlight”. Although they were full of energy and passion they didn’t sound quite as polished and professional as we knew they could. Ryan, The Producer, suggested us making click tracks so we could compare which we preferred between the “live” takes and having the songs to click tracks.
Pre Production
The next week Charlotte and myself went into the studio to tempo map our songs. This was a very strange challenge for us as we never knew what BPM our songs are or how many seconds we pause for or even what time signatures certain parts are in. Our songs were not the easiest to tempo map. Never the less we cracked on with it and spent a few days going through the songs counting out the BPM and trying to make click tracks that sound like a true version of what they sound like when we play them live. Sometimes this meant changing by just 1 BPM which would occasionally annoy Ryan as he thought we were being very anal, which we were. We also wanted to see if we could break him but alas he kept his usual positive mood as we went through the tracks analysing each and every second.
Where We're At Now
This week we’re going back into the studio to record the rest of the drums. Most of this will be done to the click tracks we made up however with “Here’s To You” and “This Isn’t Me” we’re planning on using the original “live” takes. We will see how this goes and keep you updated with the latest on this blog page. Thankyou for reading and we’ll catch you soon!
P.S. We’re going to record Balloons!