Back in the Garage
Since late December, we’ve been taking some time to work on recording. We’ve been working on our live performances, and recording is very different, so we’ve had to take a look at songs we’ve been performing and approach them differently. For the two tracks we’re working on now, we have taken two diverging paths.
The Girl In Number Six is a song we know the recording arrangement for pretty well, having recorded a demo for it previously. While there are several guitar parts we can’t cover live, it was just a question of syncing the drums and the bass together more tightly and knocking out our parts. There are still a few tweaks to make, but the version you can hear on the player is pretty much complete.
Desiree, on the other hand, required a complete re-think. The entire song really only has four chords and there are lots of ways to approach it. Finding the right way has been quite a journey, and we’re not quite there yet. We need to add one more drum part to the choruses and tighten up a couple of other things to make sure the chorus drives, but the vocal harmonies we’ve added and the guitar parts are working pretty well together. The important thing is getting the raw emotion of the song across without making life seem hopeless.
If you’d like to download the current versions of these two songs, you can go to our band page on SoundCloud to get 256 kbps MP3s. Get ‘em while they’re hot! They’ll be coming to thesixtyone.com soon.
The Girl in Number Six
Today we’re heading into the Beat Concrete vaults thanks to a little computer serendipity. I was listening to some live tracks and when Windows Media Player was through with them it moved to the next track, which turned out to be a demo of The Girl in Number Six. I’d forgotten about it, but listening to it fresh I decided it wasn’t half bad. The guitar arrangement was definitely influenced by XTC and to reflect their Northern English roots I played the secondary guitar parts through an AC-30 emulation on my trusty little Pandora headphone amp.
If you google 'the girl in number six' you get this--awesome!
The demo started with a mono rough mix of rhythm tracks we recorded in a North Coast studio a few years ago, and then I threw that on my little portable 8-track recorder and dubbed a few guitar tracks using my Pandora to try out the guitar arrangement I’d planned in my head. The mono track had a scratch vocal I’d recorded in the studio live to guide the other band members, and I doubled it with Beki singing alongside me into my 8-track’s build in mic. Voila! Instant demo.
Good demo or POS? You be the judge.
>> The Girl in Number Six (demo)
- Note: If you’re using FireFox, you may need to right-click on the file and choose ‘Save Link As…’ to save the file to your computer. Sorry to have to say that on every audio link but our ISP doesn’t seem to like FireFox. We do, though.
