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.
