BLOGS

[morten] [asger] [hardy] [jonathan] [mathias] [daniel]

04.04.09

The recording of ‘Wasted Sentence’

WARNING: This is potentially very boring reading. However, I needed to put something down on paper about what went from being a small weekend project, to a monumental experience for me. On any level.

Preparing

We had long talked about getting something recorded. After having partially existed for almost a full year, we thought we’d better get around to it, before we got tired of the ’old’ material. And preferebly sooner than later. That ended up being sooner. Actually, much sooner than any of us had dared to imagine. So soon, that our songs wasn’t even finished yet. To make matters worse, I had proclaimed that I would handle the technical aspects of recording. That being without ever having worked with ProTools or a Mac before. I would later kick myself repeatedly for being so cocky!
As we didn’t expect much of either ourselves or the studio, we reassuringly said to each other: “Ok, let’s just get these unfinished songs down on tape in a hurry and get on with the writing!”. Needless to say, it didn’t quite play out like that...

Recording begins

Going into the studio with that mindset, we breezed through setup with no real concern of the sound quality of the end product, knowing it was only going to serve as a ‘shakedown test’ of the songs.
We had planned for the recording to take a week - maybe two. So Mathias and Daniel laid down the drums and bass in a weekend. It was very nice to finally get something committed to tape. We agreed that the takes were decent and the sound pretty awful, so we happily moved on.

The long stretch

Next thing on the menu was guitars. And lots of them! It was not like we gave ourselves a lot of options as far as guitar sounds went. We only brought one amp and one cabinet! However, that turned out to sound quite good in our opinion.
We were slowly working our way through the different parts of the first song, when we looked at each other with utter dismay. We suddenly realized - this was going to take a long time!
By then, we were very satisfied with what we had layed down so far. That had the effect that every take had to be as good, if not better than the previous. As you can imagine, that ambition makes for a pretty long and exhaustive recording process. And it was. On the positive side, we got to ‘re-invent’ a lot of parts and come up with weird little ideas for licks, phrases etc.
Finally, we could see the end of it, so we decided to bring Morten in, to begin recording some vocal tracks, while we finished the guitars up.

Turning the noise into music

As with the guitars, we had absolutely no idea of what we were getting ourselves into. Morten was quite new to the band and, because of having previously written purely instrumental music, we were not in a very ‘recording vocal’ frame of mind. All in all we were all a bit nervous. All except Morten.
The first couple of takes were very strong. All of us were very relieved. Now we just had to push forward.
As a result, every lyric and phrase was turned upside down and altered ten times before being recorded. Always, did we come up with five alternative ways of pronouncing, phrasing, colouring etc. This was both a nightmare and an absolute blast. I still can’t comprehend that Morten was able to put up with this level of scrutiny for so long and still put so much energy into it all. Amazing!
At this point we thought: “This is beginning to sound like music!”.

Filling in the blanks

For the keyboards, I needed a change of scenery. And a little daylight. So Hardy and myself took residence in my apartment and started recording.
To me, this part of the precess felt a lot like ‘filling in the blanks’. And what a lovely feeling this was! This part of the recording went pretty painless. A lot of things had to be rearranged, but these changes also freshened up the whole thing quite a bit. It gave us a second wind.
At this point we had already arranged a date for Tue to begin the mixing, and we were actually done several days early. So we used the spare time to fuck around with all sorts of tweaking of sounds and parts. You might even say what we had a bit too much time...

Handing off the files

It was the night before the first day of mixing. I was sitting by myself with a tired smile, browsing through Tue’s website, when I accidentally stumbled upon Tue’s ‘technical rider’. “Oh no!!”. That meant four hours of manually renaming about 800 files. On top of that, my fucking USB storage device decided to commit suicide. Not the pleasant and relaxing evening I was hoping for. When I was all done, in every sense of the word, I fell asleep at my desk and dreamed strange dreams.

That marked the end of the recording of our first EP. It ended up taking about three months from start to finish. A huge and memorable experience that was worth every minute of it!

-Asger

03.18.09

CSS is too cool

Having just spent a couple of weeks experimenting and getting to know about the magic of Cascading Style Sheets, I have now come to the conclusion that CSS is too cool. It allows me to change the appearance of this entire site with just ONE CLICK! This site could have a completely different look for everyday of the week...or year! It truly boggles the mind. I feel so small.

-Asger

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