The recording process

As we’re gearing up to record at least two new tracks (‘Teeth Marks’ and ‘A Thousand Mistakes’), now’s a good time to give you an insight into how we went about recording Shotgun Orchestra.

The first thing we’ll probably do once we’ve gotten set up is have a talk with the producer about the kind of sounds we want, and other bands and musicians whose sounds we admire. We might listen to a few tracks with us all in the room, so we all know where we’re starting from.

Then we roll the tape and record a few takes. The first one’s a warm up but we record it as you never know, it may be a keeper. By the time you get into the studio you should practically be able to play the song backwards. There are two reasons for this: time is money in the studio and you have to be able to play unself-consciously as a band to hit a musical gallop. Adam sings a vocal as we play so that we get fully into it and respond to the lyrics musically but, due to noise bleed from the instruments, we’ll probably throw that vocal out.

Once we’ve got a handful of good takes we return to the cockpit and sound them out. Often a take can be discounted straight away if one of us feels we didn’t play at our best. It’ll take a few listens to find the best one. If we’re happy we can move on to the next song, if not we go back and do it again.

We’re listening for something that ‘rides’… when everyone is playing in full flow. We always go for this, but perhaps have managed best in the last couple of minutes of ‘Shotgun Orchestra’. This is why we play live and don’t layer our tracks to the metronome. It’s the kind of rhythm you can only hit when each musician is responding to the others all the time. That’s not possible when something is pre-recorded or programmed.

Once the core of the music is in place we try new ideas and guitar and keyboard overdubs. Even though we may have played the track hundreds of times by this point, we always think of a twist once we’re in the studio and have the freedom to try anything out.

Satisfied with this, we go home and keep listening to the material and thinking about it. Paul and I will cook up sound effects and perhaps program some detail on a laptop. Part of the ethos of Distant Signal is that we come at things from a slanted perspective: beautiful things have a small piece of their own destruction built in to them. On top of this, recording is in some ways an artificial process and we want to show that without completely deconstructing the song: the song should be good enough to hold. There’s tension between our desire to make the process as natural as possible and the possibilities that arise when you embrace the unnatural aspects of music-making. Strange things can be achieved through computers and the thousands of recording techniques developed over the last hundred years.

Then we go back to the studio and record the vocals. Adam can nail this in a take or two, and then we experiment with different backing vocals, maybe some harmony or counterpoint.

One of the reasons the backing vocals are so aggressive on our earlier recordings of ‘Bathtub of Acid’ and ‘Knee Deep in the Dead’ is that I found it difficult to sing without playing the guitar or having the rest of the band around me. When you’re standing alone by the mic it feels completely different to playing in a band. It’s something you get used to. In that session, Paul took me into the sound proofed drum room and told me to scream all of my anxiety out. It worked, and has never really bothered me since, though my voice was pretty hoarse for the rest of that session.

Once the vocals are done we listen again, exchanging ideas on the treatment of sounds and the overall effect we’re trying to achieve. Mixing is a vitally important art, but much of the work to be done is not subjective, it just needs to be done to achieve clarity and power. During this stage the engineer uses well-trained ears to eliminate frequencies that overlap, or impinge on other instruments. When this happens it creates a kind of disrupted soundwave that means the mix becomes muddy and loses its power. Speakers have a limited capacity for expressing sounds at different frequencies and volumes, so the engineer has to be mindful of where everything sits and what should come to the foreground at various times and on the spectrum between deep sounds and higher pitched sounds. Everything plays its part. While your home stereo speakers deliberately colour the sound for warmth (a mix of deeper frequencies and distorted harmonics that sound pleasing to the human ear) the studio speakers used by the engineer are designed to colour the sound as little as possible, so he or she can be aware of exactly what is going on.

While we often take part in this process, after a certain point it’s best to leave the engineer in perfect quiet. So we’ll probably head back to the recording room and have a chat and a couple of beers. Jon brought his laptop and the film version of Silent Hill (an old PlayStation game that has influenced us) to the last Shotgun session so we watched the most gruesome bits of that. This clip is about a nice man called Pyramid Head.

When there’s a chance to make the mix musically expressive or there are aesthetic choices to be made, we return to the mixing room. It’s important to listen to the results both at ear-splittingly volume and a ‘don’t breathe’ hush. Otherwise you can’t tell whether it’s the natural appeal, harmonics and apparent clarity of high volumes that’s doing the work and not the mix. When the mix is done we usually finish mastering it elsewhere. Then the process of physically making the CD and distributing it begins.

You can get Shotgun Orchestra from iTunes or from Amazon.