Our drummer, Glen, died days before the state was sent into lockdown; just four weeks after we gathered in a converted church to demo songs for a long awaited (30 fkn yrs!) debut album. He had been ill but none of us, including him, really knew how seriously. We figured that we owed it to him to proceed and honour his wish of getting an album made and out there. The lock down meant no studio recording, no getting together to rehearse and write...a producer or engineer was out of the question too. what we had was my voice over studio and rudimentary recording skills...and the internet. I had to study and train, alone, to be both recording engineer and producer and get my little off grid studio in the wombat forest up to scratch to record a contemporary album. We also needed a drummer.
Guitars were recorded out doors with the amps cranked to their sweet spots and we got good tone...it would have been impossible in my tiny studio to achieve the energy we did. Our ears would still be ringing! Jonny would drop by surreptitiously on his wine delivery run so as not to run afoul of the authorities and lay down his guitar tracks and discuss approaches. Dean would record his bass parts at home in the city along to programmed drum tracks and then email them for me to lay into the sessions. We found a session drummer, Nik Hughes, who happened to also be locked down...in his home studio…in the US! He agreed to perform the drum parts I had programmed, and recorded the live drums… in Virginia. This was done for a totally reasonable fee and he would send me the individual stems. So in effect, we over-dubbed live drums onto the tracks. We just swapped out the programmed drums for the live tracks. We then found out that Nik’s is the current touring drummer with incredibly successful nineties band, Bush. Still touring internationally. Glen would have loved that.
I wasn't yet up to mixing the whole record but we put ourselves out there and sent our demo recordings to mixing 'god' Barny Barnicott ( Arctic Monkeys, Sam Fender, Kasabian, Coldplay) in the UK and he agreed to mix the album. FARK! We were totally stoked! There is no way that would have happened if the world wasn't in lockdown! ‘Barns’ was locked in his residential studio in Kent (Blue Bell Hill Studios )with no sessions possible. We got super lucky there. We went from a small digital studio in the wombat forest with a newb producer / engineer, to a major residential studio in the UK with 56 channels of SSL 6000 G analog console, all Rupert Neve ISA pre amps and processing to tape!! Yeah, I guess it is OK to dream big. Sometimes it comes true....but now it has to meet its audience, so back to reality, THUD!