We are really pleased to announce that we are supporting Marillion on their November tour!

http://www.marillion.com/tou

the dates we are doing so far (maybe more, but some technical aspects to over come) are

14th November @ the Manchester Academy
15th November @ the Bournemouth Opera House
19th November @ the Forum LONDON

tickets are here http://www.marillion.com/tou

we would love you to come and see us play and support two great bands!

more to come…

SSP
x

Once we got back to the studio and started working on the drums, we bounced them on to a 24trk Radar, and started to track the rest of the Band. 

Ben(Bass) was first up, he uses a really old Fender Jazz with an Ampeg SVTii all valve monster with a 6×10 Cab, we mic’ed it with a Sm57 and a Heil mic through an API mic pre and the 57 though the Shadow Hills, turned the amp to eleven it was that simple! It took over a week to track the Bass, Ben is very particular about what he hears so it had to be spot on.

Then came the guitars, Mike had about 6 guitars he bought along with him, 12 string Ricky, two telecasters, and couple of les paul style guitars, plus with my 6 string ricky we had plenty to choose from.  At the time Mike played through a Mesa amp & Marshal cab. We had also borrowed an old 1950’s marshal head & Cab from the Delays, as they only live round the corner, I had recorded them a long time ago when they were Idoru so we’ve become friends over the years, we also had a Hi-Watt 100w hand wired head & cab plus an Orange Tiny Terror and a Rocker 30. We would normally couple a few together to get the tone we were after, the Orange and the Old 1950’s Marshall paired up quite nice, the Hi-Watt was generally super clean and used at very loud volumes then paired up with some thing dirty. In fact the Orange Tiny Terror was used to track pretty much all the rhythm guitars for Brown Bread…at only 7 watts it’s a monster little thing.

At this stage we had almost all the main parts done, all on the Radar recorder ready for mixing.

In Part 3 we’re recording session musicians and mixing.

In the first of four blogs, Peter J Croissant talks us through the making of the new album.

Early 2006, after we had released Blue Born Earth Boy, things were going well, great reviews, some great shows, but I began to panic whether I could actually write another album, strange feeling, as if some how I would loose the ability for song writing.

I spent the next 6 months writing and producing demos to the band, seeing what they like or disliked, and steadily we started rehearsing, one by one we tested them in the live set. At the time I was listening to a lot of Rufus Wainwright, Midlake, Johnathan Rice, more from a production stand point really, they all have massive sonics and lavish productions, some thing I wanted to improve upon from the debut album.

Late 2006 we hired the Lantern theatre, Romsey, situated on the south coast of England for a week to record the drums for the entire album. We started each day with McDonalds sausage & egg mc muffin…two of em!! as Alec was burning it off I was just getting rather large!

Technical note: I spent a long time thinking about how we might capture the best recording we could afford, Brian Lucey, who had mastered our debut album, we had become good friends and spoke at great length on how we might achieve this.

Mics, we used MD 441s on KIK, SNR and Toms, NS10 Speaker on the kik drum, which consisted of two bass drums one in front of the other creating a tunnel, we had the 441 in the first drum, the placed the NS10 Speaker on the outer drum with a really resonant head. For the over heads we had and AEA R88 stereo ribbon mic which sounded awesome, you could just listen to that and you were actually there. Then we had various room mics, couple of C12 414’s in the odd places, like the corners of the rooms were all the sound built up, very thick but useful none the less.

All the cabling was gold plated Mogami which fed the Shadow Hills Mic pres, which we bought on recommendation from Brian, he was not wrong. They are hand wired, switchable Iron / Nickel transformers for subtle tone flavours, wonderfully clean and loads of gain. This then fed the Apogee A-D converters recorded at 96K straight in to Logic Recorder. Hey presto glorious drums as they sounded right there in the room, we had now captured just that.

In Part Two we’re back to our own studio in Southampton.