After a lovely day catching up with Joan yesterday, I got up early and started work on 24 Hours again. At least an hour's editing was wasted by the fact that I don't properly understand the way that this upgraded version of Logic, the music program, works. But I'm getting to the point where I think the track is sounding quite good. When you're mixing, your aim is to get all the sounds talking to each other, and that's just beginning to happen. In some parts of the song you have to be subtle, and in others, much more radical. A little section of it is playing in my head even now that I've stopped for the night: scritchy, scratchy, scritchy scratchy...
And this afternoon, Gina sent me a different mix of one of her songs to work on. For expedience, I plugged in a brutally simple microphone and just improvised probably far too many things on to the song. Tomorrow I'll take a listen, and maybe weed a few of them out then replace the keepers with vocals recorded on a proper microphone.
In between all that, I've been rehearsing some of the songs I'm going to record for my next album. Some of them are stretching my technical abilities as a player, but that's the name of the game. I know from experience that difficult things to play become easy suddenly, and you don't have to think about them any more.
Oh yes, and two mastered Chefs tracks turned up in my inbox from the studio where the album is being rescued. You could hardly hear the vocals on one of them but the guitars sounded amazing, and I guess I just have to put my ego aside and acknowledge that there is more to a song than the vocalist.
When we recorded the album, I was very ill with a duodenal ulcer. The whole idea of releasing it reminded me of that time, but listening back to the songs, well: nobody else wrote songs like we did, and I do feel proud of what we did. We were total amateurs, a group of self-taught and not very sophisticated young people who spent as much time fighting between ourselves as we did writing songs and rehearsing. We were completely naive about the music industry and rather prone to friends, family and music industry people interfering in what we were doing. I remember going to meet Pete Waterman, and the Moody Blues' producer being interested in us. As a musician I've probably got several hundred near misses to my name, and I definitely have several hundred dark stories from the underbelly of life as a musician. Unfortunately, they are not at all entertaining! On the plus side, we had a great relationship with John Peel, and I reckon we were the forerunners of Twee and of course, checked-shirt-and-fringed-jacket band couture (pretentious, Moi?), a style that I wear to this day. We also learned to play quite well through rehearsing all day, every day, for weeks on end. And I can still conjure up a harmony from thin air.
So it's time to release our vintage Chefs songs and set them free from the attic!
Everything is set up in the kitchen ready to start up again tomorrow morning. I'm going to have a weekend of singing, guitarring and mixing, which is exactly perfect for early February, doncha think?
La la la!
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