“Ooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaa… Ok, found it… what note is that?”

Silence greets my question. I pull my head out of the bass drum and look at Alex, who meets my gaze with the business end of his camera phone. So you recorded that, ya bastard, I think to myself. I walk over to a guitar and hum the note to myself, looking for its match on the fretboard. E flat. The bass drum resonates in E flat. To get the biggest, most booming sound I can, that’s what the new drum skins arrayed on the floor around Mez will have to be tuned to.

Alex can’t really believe it’s taking so long to tune the drums, but man is it worth it. Eventually even Mez gets bored and goes home early for a “3 course meal”, smug look on his face as he leaves me and a practically weeping Earl to finish fine tuning the drums, ready for the first new album recording session tomorrow morning. Who needs instrument techs? Eventually the drums are tuned and in place. Up go the microphones – I’m trying a new drum miking technique, aply named “the recorderman method”. It’s supposed to get a tight and punchy drumkit sound. Will it survive my idiocy? We’ll see about that. I grapple with a tape measure and enlist spare hands to hold lengths of rope for me while I place the mics. With that sorted, Alex’s bass tone takes all of 5 minutes to set, fine tune and test. We perform a little victory dance, and leave for the night to go and get a Tesco pasta meal. One course, of course. More gruel, sir?

Friday night comes and goes. Saturday morning is cold but fresh.

We’re not your typical rock band, a fact the empty streets around our studio complex probably didn’t appreciate as we pulled up before the doors even opened, early on Saturday morning. The complex owner arrived and let us in. Safely in the warm, Mez and Alex make hot drinks. I opt for a tasty red cylinder of sugar (coke) and a little red square of sugar and wafer. KitKat – Can’t Record Without One (still waiting for my endorsement money Nestle!). It’s cold in our studio, and while the electric radiator does its job Mez warms up with some paradiddles, and Alex uses the time wisely to berate friends and loved ones. Sickened by his cruel duplicity, I call the session to order. Time to do something worth doing.

I pressed record.

Guess Who? You got it, I’m back for round 2 of the Blogging world of bloggages and the same rules apply as the last one: I WILL go off on a tangent; it’s just the way I work so you might need to read back at times. It’s the Quentin Tarantino effect lol.

I’ve been listening to a lot of music recently, well I say a lot but what I really mean is about 15 songs over and over and just when you think you couldn’t possibly listen to them over again…………………………….BAM!!!…………YOU WRONG FOOL!!! You slap them on again cuz you need to learn them but it’s no bad thing cuz they are really cool, they are the demos for the album we are currently working on. All of the songs appeared in the form of acoustic guitars, dotted in drum beats and bass notes and of course the rare pleasure of hearing Josh’s voice fronting all of them, quite lovely!

My initial thought when I heard them was, “SHIT! I’ve got lots to learn” and really, I still do. But in all honesty I thought, “my god this guy is a fucking genius” they sounded beautiful, the blend of acoustic and Josh’s vocal is really nice but the songs had words with so much meaningless meaning* (Josh will understand what I mean) to them that I didn’t think anything we do could make these songs better than they already are. *meaningless meaning = means more to the listener than the artist. I’d love to say I mean every word but a lot of the time its just a fictional encounter, I’d have nothing otherwise lol.

I’d been having a shitty day at work and we had practice on that evening which I was looking forward to but I’d been listening to these fucking songs for ages, I was anxious, I mean we’d had a go at the odd one or two to see how they sounded, but on this day I was infuriated to the core for why I cant remember (most likely them fucking retards up and down the country thinking it’s a good excuse to steal and terrorize people “cuz we don’t get no respect from dem” dick heads!) but I wanted to get it all out in the studio. Email: Really wanna play the whole album!!! Sent! Lads reply: “why the hell not?” Fucking brilliant I couldn’t wait, I was clock watching.

I got there, late as per usual but I believe so was Earl Grey (Alex) if I remember right, might’ve been Mez, anyway, we kicked off with track 2 as track 1 was one of the aforementioned and BOOOOOM!!! I felt all that fury starting to lift off my shoulders and by the time we were on about track 5 it was almost disbelief that we were doing really well for a first time attempt. The work started to become more intense, yet the ideas seemed to be flying out of every hole, ok not all of them were good but we were making good progress every time we played them. Although there were also them songs that are, what we say in the trade “bastards” only because I was/am struggling with them but rest assured little progress is still progress.

We’d been rehearsing for a while with few gigs, so we could now concentrate more on the new songs and record a rough version for referencing and where to improve blahblahblah. So back to listening to the songs but instead of JW and a computer it was Captain Horizon now, and proved very informative too. We had a little over a week before we held a “secret airing” to a few people to gain their opinions and critique so this must mean, you got it, NEW DISORDER FEST was the coming weekend.

I must say for such a small festival it was bigger than Woodstock in heart, there wasn’t an ego in sight or at least nobody was flaunting it anyway, you know what I’m like, I’m a pain in the arse but never usually an arsehole so what I mean is there was everyone pulling in to make things work for a great cause ‘Rock Against Child Pornography’ who have been doing such a tremendous job and this festival has helped project it further. I arrived to the raucous sound of me good mates Signify, which I was chuffed about cuz I thought we’d end up missing them, as it was they’d just started and they were kickin’ ass and taking names, but just seconds earlier I was greeted by a pink & purple putty tat with the same coloured hair by way of Cathy G which is always nice to see Cath but you’re missing the point she had her face painted!!! Haha, I joke but it was my calling and I had all day to ponder what I was having so after a few beers and chats with friends old and new it was approaching set time, composure is key really, but I’m a last minute kind of guy so while everyone else was setting up and his Earlship most probably ironing those hideous trousers I decided to go get me face painted. I had a lazy idea of evilness on my face and decided on a zombie to which Red Imp created in 5mins as she assured me, well it was more like 4mins 15secs so I had time to spare lol. I wont give you a rundown of the gig cuz I cant remember it all I know is it was awesome! What I will say though is when I saw Alex in them fucking trousers I didn’t think my evil face would look very evil pissing itself laughing at him all set but, composure is key you see! Pretty much everything after that set became a blur until I woke up in Signify’s van freezing cold, bad time’s man, hungover in the cold, bbbbrrrrrrr thanks a lot for the lift home Kendo appreciate it man.

Moving back to the album we had two rehearsals to practice before performing them in front of people for feedback. Mez was cacking his pants and Earl was nervous too, me and Josh however seemed to be pretty cool about it well I felt good cuz even if we did fuck up that’s the time to do it, while it’s being shot down lol. But as Sunday loomed and I’m talking like Saturday night into Sunday morning when I started to show signs of concern, but château nuef du pap!!! this wasn’t a gig, it was a critique and it was just like recording when its just me alone, but this time I wasn’t, there was people there but it was like a reverse of the recording because of the nudeness that surrounds me, I felt sick and just wanted to get it done but once I turned up I felt ok, more tired than anything, perhaps I had trouble sleeping? It started out quite badly as the 1st track came under scrutiny before we played a note but that was fine until we played a note and I came in wrong and had to start again but I laughed it off and away we go lol. It was a really good exercise as it opened our eyes to what needed doing and what was actually not as bad as we made out and ended up being fan favourite’s, so food for thought and time to get a move on cuz we’re nearing the recording dates now.

My ramble is now over for another crazy chapter, so until next time………
Its not goodbye…..
just………………….Bonjour!

The song, not the fish. They had their chance.

Good is the biggest stumbling block there is on the way to great. Sometimes it’s easier to go around good and strike out towards great from the safe and familiar ground of being totally shit. You might be wondering what I’m talking about. And yes, I am drinking whisky.

What I’m trying to say is, you can work on a song and make it good. You can endlessly write a more appropriate chorus, work on the perfect drum fill, put in your favourite chord shapes. And you’ll end up with a good song, pat yourself on the back, and feel like a right little songsmith.

Doesn’t mean the song’s great though. It might be insipid. It might not move a mollusc, let alone a discerning music lover. But because you can point to all the good things in it, you’re blinded to the fact it just isn’t inspiring or inspired. And conversely, a song can be shit and then suddenly make the leap to brilliant. You can point at all the ways it doesn’t work, is boring, or fails in its intent, yet for some reason it all suddenly clicks together. We’re lucky – it sometimes happens to us. I’ll let you in on a secret: I didn’t think Poker was a very good song. It was terrible for the longest time, only when Mez and Whitty performed it with such wide eyed conviction did we see that there was more to it that a workout on the bass guitar.

We’re working on songs now. Songs that started life as acoustic demos I recorded during my sojourn from work in May, while the leaves grew on the trees and the sun shone down unnoticed by me. I was in a little bedroom with recording gear and an acoustic guitar. The curtains were shut, and I was on my own. Now we’re hammering them out in the practice room, sometimes reeling off new ideas with ease, sometimes bouncing off the walls in anger and pent up frustration at the songs, each other, our own fingers…

The things I’m noticing are interesting. As we make these songs our own, they change. They become leaner, we distil them down. Songs that I thought were ok when it was me and an acoustic become forces of nature with the band pounding them out. Songs I arrogantly thought would be immense and emotional might not work at all, or prove to be flat and samey. Then one of the guys will take the song and fix it with an idea so simple or so obvious that I’d never have thought of it in a million years. More than at any point in the last few years I’m feeling a connection with my three brothers. I can’t describe how it feels to watch these guys take my ideas in their hands and actually treat them with respect, with passion, and with belief.

When I first played the other guys what I’d been working on, they were my songs. Now I listen to that CD and it sounds so boring and flat. Those songs have changed, grown up, and they’re not mine any more. They belong to the band. I absolutely cannot wait to start recording them, because thanks to Alex, Mez and Whitty I think we’ve got something special on our hands.

Welcome to 2011: they come from my mobile phone. At least, that’s where the songs we’ll be talking about in this blogfermented. Some became stronger, more purified and lean. Others turned to mushy mulch, wet and stinking, straight from the bottom of a compost heap.

I play the guitar at home quite a lot. Sometimes I’ll be noodling away and an idea will just fall into my head all by itself – a guitar riff, a lyric idea, a special effect that I think would be cool in a song, even just a feeling that I want to try to capture in music. And when that happens, I know I’ll forget it totally within minutes. It’s a race against time to catch it before it vanishes forever. So out comes my mobile, with its handy voice record function. I bet your phone has one too, have you ever used it? I use mine almost every day. If it weren’t for mobiles, I’d have to carry a Dictaphone round like a rogue reporter who’s never had a scoop in his whole career. I record the idea, be it 10 seconds or two minutes. Then, safe in the knowledge that the idea is safe in my phone, I forget about it. Having an idea is much easier than finishing a song – ideas are always great because of their potential. Songs are crap because you haven’t lived up to that potential.

I’ve been working like that for about 5 years. A few months ago I decided to sort through the recordings I had and try to turn the best ones into songs. Only one snag: there were 1,500 of these buggers: little snippets of the embryos that would one day grow up to be music. Oh, crap, ah’m gonna be a daddy!

But I’m nothing if not industrious (read: stupidly obsessed) so I listened to them all. I was really harsh – if I didn’t think what I was hearing was special in some way, and had potential to be a song, I’d delete it. Sometimes I’d hear an idea recorded years ago, then recorded again much more recently, with different words or a slightly different hook. Sometimes the same idea would be a recurring theme in loads of different recordings. Often I’d hear an idea that had since become part of another finished song. It took about 5 days, but eventually I had 300 ideas that I felt might, with a bit of hard work, inspiration and luck, become finished songs that didn’t totally suck.

How do 300 sound clips, probably averaging 20 seconds long, turn into the basis for a Captain Horizon album? Ideas are only one ingredient, and they’re easy – anyone can have an idea. Turning it into something good is the hard bit.

For me, the second ingredient was something very bitter indeed. The week I finished sorting through the clips, me and my workmates were called into the Bosses office at my job and told there was no work for us that month: We’d either need to take unpaid leave, or face redundancies. I left work that day facing three weeks of unpaid nothing. Some people would have looked for another job, or at least temp work to fill the time. Maybe some would have gone travelling or visited friends or at least tried to get some sunshine.

I set up a studio in the spare bedroom, and closed the door on the world.

Right then me old Chumley Warner’s, this is my first and most probably my last blog on here as I don’t really seem to do incredibly well with computermibobs! You will find that this blog will mainly be how a conversation with me would go, ie; I will quite often be talking about one thing and thinking of 3 others, so I WILL drift in and out of things as confusingly as I normally do and will have no real structure, so please bear with me.

First and foremost, all of what these ass hole so’ bitchiz said derogatory about my good person is bullshit! Now that’s cleared up I can persist in doing what I do best……………. That’s correct, everything ha-ha..

Well, what’s it like being the front-man of the best inventive, ballsy and most kickass band of our generation yet to be noticed then?  It’s quite cool actually! It’s a rollercoaster at times, I’m always worried about my delivery though to be honest, be it in the recording studio or live at gigs, and I hate being off key, especially in the studio.

As it is I don’t really worry too much about live performances, for some reason I always seem to get a boost from somewhere, even if I’m flu’d up to the arsehole I manage to pull through un noticed. In recording on the other hand I find it very hard to get the same pulse, I don’t know why really, cuz when we’re writing the song I get to the point where the song is all I want to hear and all I want to play  (there is also a point where I end up hating it too). Also, I feed off people at gigs you see, be there 1 person or 100 people, I feel its my personal mission to make them feel like they’ve seen a great show, and rightly so, they’ve just paid to come and see a night of music and they fucking deserve it, I cant stand seeing a band who stand there looking at their shoes with their dicks in their hand looking like a bunch of spare pricks at a wedding, I AM BORED NOW!!! I get that sort of thing while recording, I try my damn hardest to get into gig mode, I’ll try anything to get that Zen, like I’ll do some push-ups, jog round the block, drink hot water with lemon and sugar with countless energy drinks, wind people up, slap my own face and shout at myself to name just a few, because, I hear every little snag and glick so it really knocks me confidence when I’m hearing that absolute bullshit that comes out of my mouth cuz at that point I’m thinking I’m one of those dick-in-hand geezers, but fuck that, time to man up (see told ya I’d ramble a bit).

During the recording of our first EP it was in an old Tudorian house and I spent the night there, woke up, had breakfast, drank hot lemon and honey, and feel I really pulled the proverbial shit-storm out of the proverbial global-shit-bag because we were on a schedule and there was someone new to perform to I guess, but with Radiostasis I was alone with Watson and I felt nude. I was aware of all my mistakes, but together I think he brought out the best in me by reassuring me I was doing well.  But after singing El Nibre for the 367^th time I was getting restless so we downed tools and it was left for another day. I was dreading it for fear of ruining what was already sounding like a great album-to-be and there I was fucking up everybody’s hard work, but that little siesta was all I needed after having worked stupid hours over Christmas and generally feeling run down I came back like a new man after a welcomed rest, to finish off a song that never made it to the EP, hahahaha, ironic really.

Different subject while I’m thinking about it, during practice, I have a terrible case of the giggles which is usually due to someone flinging the odd BUM note in the mix be it vocally or musically, usually its Thomson, all I have to do is look at him and I fucking crack up, I really don’t know why but he proper slays me, maybe it’s the fact (to me anyway, and he’ll hate me for saying this so sorry dude) that he has a wonderful voice, I mean very well spoken, so when he curses, (to me anyway) it sounds hilarious it proper tickles me, so for a while I find myself laughing out loud, “lol” as it is most commonly known nowadays “lol”. Each one of us is a completely different person to the other, which is most probably the reason we all work so well together. I also know that I can be a reet pain in the arse most of the time but that’s just the way I am, so there.

If I’m honest with you all, there is one person who hardly ever gets mentioned as part of Captain Horizon but our Pete is an absolute hero he is the 5^th member of CH as far as I’m concerned, I owe a lot to him. Like Mez (obviously) I’ve known Pete for a good 10 years and Mez is my brother, we’ve played together in all our main bands from thence.

Pete, has been a huge part of my progression as a front-man, in-fact he’s been like a guardian to me, I mean if I fall 50 feet away from Pete he’ll be there to stop me from hitting the ground hard, and shit like climbing onto the bar, I’ve got Pete to thank for that and pretty much all of my stage antics. For instance way back in Final Redemption we entered the “Ultimate Live Battle Of The Bands” competition at the “Robin 2” venue in Bilston and cuz Mez is a lefty drummer, sound guys shit themselves like their life has just folded into the depths of Satan’s gusset, so we either had to open or play first, basically if you had a lefty you had to open the show, so me being young and fiery it pissed me off, I mean its no fucking hardship to switch the kit the other way its just fucking lazyness if you ask me but that’s a different story (as I do have a lot of respect for sound guys, as long as they take pride in what they do and not just going through the motions). So Pete, to calm me down and in all competitive form said “go out there and make them follow that!” what I heard was “go out there and shit in their faces and tell them to follow that” that’s what I heard, so good as gold I went up there all full of youthful spunk and smashed it then at the end of our set I proceeded with the line “FOLLOW THAT” at the top of my lungs and I immediately saw all the other bands completely shit down their legs, the Robin 2 stunk lol. I look back now and think ‘what an arrogant little shit I was’ but I feel like if you’ve got it, flaunt it lol. Basically, Pete is mostly to thank for what I do on and off stage, he’s the one who’s always at the front giving me a bollocking for not making a show of it.

Pete has taught me a lot in this game so, Pete this part of my blog writing future I dedicate to you thank you me old mucka I love you man x

I’ve enjoyed this blog shit to be honest so I think I’ll be back soon,

Thanks for reading hope it’s not been too confusing

Peace, Love & Bananas!!!

Whitty x

Welcome to this, my first entry in what after some debate I’ve decided to give the rather clumsy title “My Blog About Gigging”.  Or “My BAG”.  I decided, since our very own Josh Watson has been good enough to lavish upon the world a blow-by-torrid-blow account of the recording process, to give people a bit of background into what Captain Horizon gigs are like from our point of view.  By which I mean, my point of view.

Yes, this is the largest crowd we've played to.

Let’s start, then, with a simple question:  What’s a typical gig like for us?  What happens?

(I imagine a lot of this will be the same for every unsigned band.  I’m not claiming we’re special or anything…)

17.00:  Load Up

Band arrives at lockup at 5pm, with the exception of Whitty (singer).  After a brief consultation regarding tickets for the evening’s gig (“… Why haven’t we sold any fucking tickets for this evening’s gig?!”), gear is dismantled.  Mez repairs his drums using sticky tape, nondescript pocket lint, some roadkill and a credit card.  Josh (guitarist) rewires his rig to pick up two or three of the better pay-per-view porn channels.  Alex (bassist) trips on an errant wire, one end of which he’s holding, stumbles into his speaker cab face-first and angrily blames Mez for getting in his way.

After twenty minutes of extremely heavy lifting, gnashing of teeth and cursing, the cars are loaded up.  (We can’t afford a van.  Even if we could, nobody’s got anywhere safe enough to keep it and we all live miles apart.)

Whitty arrives, drinks an energy drink, smokes a rollup and calls Alex a dick.

18.00:  Arrive at Venue

Upon arrival at the venue, it becomes clear we’ve been told someone’s ideal load-in time, not the time they actually expected us to get there.  As such, the sound guy hasn’t turned up yet and the venue appears to be shut for the foreseeable future.

Some time later, we get in.  We carry our gear up the stairs.  We set up.  We soundcheck, usually first.

Why do we usually soundcheck first?  Well, we seem to play more than our fair share of headlining gigs, for a variety of reasons – I think chief among them is that Mez is a left-handed drummer and very few venues (sound guys) can be bothered to switch a set of drumkit mics around more than twice in an evening.  Other possible reasons for our continual headlining slots include: stupidity, since headlining as an unsigned act is essentially a very bad thing and we for some reason keep agreeing to do it; or, if I was feeling supremely arrogant (not to mention inaccurate), I’d say people just don’t want to go on after us.  Ha!  …  No, it’s definitely stupidity.

It’s taken us a long time to work out that headlining’s not a good deal, but basically, you can usually assume that at an unsigned show the band before the headliner (the main support act) will have the biggest crowd of people to play to.  Around 60% of these will then leave.  The only gutting thing about this is that whether a band is any good or not has no bearing on the number of people who hang around to see the beginning of their set.  On who stays for the duration of the set, perhaps, but the vast majority of punters who are there to see a mates’ band won’t bother sticking around for anything else.  A fact of life for unsigned shows, I think.

Anyway, during soundcheck, we try to be nice to the sound guy.  For some reason these people often have a bee in their bonnet.  We try not to give them any reason to purposefully make us sound any more shit than we’d sound left to our own devices.

19.00:  Start Waiting

Having soundchecked and removed our gear from the stage, we settle down for the part of the process I find hardest: the interminable wait which precedes playing our set.  This often involves watching other bands soundcheck, and has led to one of my favourite pre-gig occupations: passing judgement on other bands.  Often for unfair, spurious and outrageously stereotypical reasons.

What is this? Has Tony Iommi had a lovechild with a spaniel? RUBBISH!

We have played with some absolutely blinding bands.  We’ve also played with a good few bands which were no better than livestock, mooing nervously and shitting on the monitors.  You can more or less tell before a band’s done anything at all which way it’s going to go.  Do they get themselves set up quickly?  Are they polite to the sound guy?  Once set up, do band members noodle at full volume until someone physically restrains them?  If a band’s good, almost every time the answers will be yes, yes and no.

20.00:  Continue Waiting

I think everyone handles the wait to go onstage slightly differently, and it’s the same for our band.  Mez and Josh concern themselves mostly with quietly getting geared up for the set by having a light dinner and a beer.  That’s fair enough.  Personally, I find myself physically unable to remain in the same place for more than two minutes before I am compelled by an unseen force to wander off elsewhere and commence another conversation.  I hope it doesn’t offend people that on a gig night I have this bizarre pattern of asking how they are, nodding blankly at their answer and then striding off towards someone else to repeat the exercise.  In reality, I’m pretty sure it must do – who does this guy think he is?  Has he forgotten how to understand English?  Does he even recognise me?  Oh, he’s gone.

To all you people who I’ve done this to, I’m sorry.  I console myself by repeating the mantra:  You’re not as bad as Whitty.

The first time I ever played a gig with Whitty, I was staggered at how annoying he became before we started playing.  If gregariousness were an Olympic event, Whitty would have been disqualified for setting off fireworks in the judging panel’s hotel rooms the night before the competition was due to be held.  Before gigs, more than at other times (and that’s saying something) he rediscovers those schoolboy jokes which amount to gross invasion of personal space and in some cases Actual Bodily Harm.  He’s a frontman.  Getting hyped up before a show comes naturally to him – in fact, he really needs it.

Look into these eyes for a few seconds and tell me you're not scared by what you see.

You wouldn’t expect a runner to sprint a hundred metres without warming up.  As far as I can tell, tweaked nipples, slapped faces, pinched elbows and that thing where you hit someone in the crook of their supporting knee so they fall down like a sabotaged puppet are his way of stretching off.  And he does these things to everyone - strangers, friends, promoters, loved ones, bar staff and would-be muggers included.

I realise so far this has been a catalogue of things which on the face of it don’t sound like they’re much fun – or perhaps they do sound fun, and I’m painting them in the most miserably bleak light possible.  Luckily, in part 2 the good bit happens!

Most of the terrible mixes I’ve ever heard in my life have been my own. Nobody can just sit down and mix something that sounds great, it takes a long time to develop your ears, brain and heart to be able to plunge yourself through a wall of sound and start tinkering in a way that, when you drag yourself back out of the ocean of noise, looks pretty good from a distance. The hardest thing is being able to zone your perspective in and out, to deal with the tiniest facet of the mix while also listening to the whole sound as it lurches from verse to chorus etc.

Ears, Brain and Heart.

There are no such things as “golden ears”. Unless you’re deaf, you can hear everything I can hear when I’m mixing. That little rattle of the snare that shouldn’t be there, that weird ringing sound on the backing vocals, the way the guitars are too loud in the verse and too quiet in the chorus, you can hear it too. But you might not know what you’re hearing. You’ll just know something doesn’t sound right, that the mix sounds weak. But you can train your ears to take sounds apart, to identify the components that make them – that the murky rattle is from the snare, that the ringing sound is a room resonance at a certain frequency that you can cut out.

Mixing is the hardest my brain has ever worked. It’s totally draining. A mixing session is never finished, only abandoned, and some of my sessions go on for 7 hours or more without a break. It’s like a full day’s work except I’m concentrating! They say you’re better off taking 5 minutes to get a drink and refresh yourself, but when I’m in the room, in the sounds, I don’t want to stop. It’s all in my head; I’ll lose it if I don’t keep it there. There’s so much to remember, the mix becomes like a taxi driver’s mental road map – the bits of takes you want to bring forward, the bits you want to bury, the fact you want the backing vocals to lean towards the left of the mix to counter the tambourine that comes in halfway through the second bridge, the reverb that’s adding ambience EXCEPT for 15 seconds in the solo because you want it to stand out stark naked in that section… once you forget the details, the mix becomes cloudy, you don’t know where things are happening, why something sounds the way it does, and the whole thing runs away from you.

The Heart. It keeps my blood flowing, but we’re talking heart in the old school artsy sense – emotions, feeling. Mixing can too easily become a technical endeavour, a soulless process of making sure everything can be heard. But mixing is fucking art, man. As much art as songwriting, as performing, as painting, and much much more than interpretive dance. The mix has to move you. If you’re not jiggling in your seat, occasionally realising something awesome is happening right in front of you in the air between the speakers, give up; you’re juggling shit. What you’re doing is totally magical. You’re manipulating vibrations in the air, making the atoms around you dance with some higher purpose. You are to the music as God is to the universe. Whether or not you think God exists as some entity is totally irrelevant here, you’re him and your creation is noise.

It’s your ears that tell you where you are, your heart that tells you where you need to go, and your brain that figures out how to get there. I have some very clever friends who have tried to work out why music evolved when it doesn’t help us at all in the game of survival and reproduction. I don’t know, but empathy plays a big part in it – communication, understanding, society. It’s almost telepathy. Music is a cry. Maybe a cry for help, for understanding, for action, but if you write from your heart, then people will hear who you are. It’s no accident that we empathise with musicians we enjoy, that we use phrases like “sings with soul” or “wears his heart on his sleeve”. We understand them because they’ve taken who they are, and written it right into your brain, made your synapses fire just the way they want them to, to get you to understand. Sometimes, when music hits you totally, the hairs on your neck stand up and the shiver goes down your spine, I think you become the person who wrote it.

This is the power of music.

There are a number of ways to skin a cat. The same can be said of mixing. Both will leave you with blood on your hands and a very upset girlfriend. But not for the same reason. Mixing leaves you open to accusations of not having any time for your loved one, and always having the thousand yard stare of a war veteran. Skinning your girlfriend’s cat leaves you open to accusations of horrible brutality.

Luckily I’ve only went down one of those paths. So without further ado here is my guide to flaying domesticated mammals:

Only kidding. We’re talking about mixing here. More specifically, the tools that get it done. But you’re going to need to pay attention and if you don’t understand what I’m saying, ask or you’ll have to repeat the class.

Mixing is literally that: taking more than one sound and mixing them together. But if that were the end of it I suspect it wouldn’t be a thing at all any more than opening the drawer to get a teabag is a named part of “making a cup of tea”. As it is, for a mix to sound good it has to fulfil some very difficult criteria. It has to be clear in its intent. It has to generally have a balanced spectral content: that is the relative amount of low frequencies and high frequencies. Too much or too little of any frequency range makes the mix sound amateurish. Most of all it has to be true to the intention of the song. It has to somehow evoke the dynamic contrasts between sections, the tension and release of parts, and the balance of instruments as the musicians intended. It doesn’t have to be based on reality, but it does have to make you believe it’s happening. We all know a human voice isn’t as loud as a drum kit or cranked guitar amp, but when we hear songs we don’t care because it’s made to sound believable.

Each part that I’ve recorded gets its own track. Some parts get more than one track if I’ve used more than one mic, as mentioned in previous instalments of “Josh drinks whisky and talks about recording”. Each of these tracks can be raised or lowered in volume, and panned anywhere between the left and right speaker, like so: (turn up your speakers so you can clearly hear what I’m doing!)

01 Levels and panning by Cirrusband

Mixes tend to need more than just those volume and panning adjustments to sound good, though, unless it’s a simple mix or has been recorded in the most expert way imaginable. And I promise I’ve not done that. Mixes also have to cater for the deficiencies of the human ear. We think it’s a great organ, and in some ways it is – I’ve read that if it were much more sensitive we’d actually be able to hear the effect of air molecules vibrating against it in Brownian motion. So in some ways it’s as high fidelity as it’s possible to be in air. It can detect an incredible range of frequencies and process them into something we understand as sound rather than just a bunch of vibrations in the fluid that surrounds us (yep, air is a fluid!).

But ears are also totally shit. Like, f*cking blind to sound.

If you’re listening to an instrument that has lots of bass, and there’s another instrument that also has lots of bass but is quieter, you probably won’t hear the bass from the other instrument at all. You’ll just hear a muddy noise that gets in the way of you being able to hear what’s happening. This masking happens in time too. A loud sound will mask a quiet sound even if the quiet sound happens a split second before the loud sound. The result of this masking is audio confusion: Instruments that should by rights sound clear, that sound great on their own, will somehow vanish without a trace into the mix, leaving only a sense of congestion and lack of clarity.

But we have tools to combat this. Clever little tools. The most powerful of these is the EQ (short for equalisation). It’s one of the first effects they ever made, because they needed it. With EQ we can filter out frequencies we don’t want to hear or wouldn’t hear anyway, add frequencies where there are gaps in the mix to help a sound cut through, get rid of bad sounds and emphasise good ones. Sometimes I think of mixing as being like trying to push a bunch of big plasticine shapes onto a little pane of glass, and having to somehow change the shapes to make them all fit while still keeping them recognisable. Sorry if that’s a stupid analogy, I genuinely imagine this when I’m mixing!

02 EQ by Cirrusband

The next most powerful tool is compression. It’s a mysterious tool that takes years to understand, let alone master. At its most simple, it compresses the volume range of whatever you put into it – the loud and quiet bits come out more even in volume than they were before. This is handy. A good live band can go from whisper quiet to roaring, and that sounds great live but it wouldn’t work on a recording as you drive along in your car or listen on the bus: Make it loud enough to hear the quiet bits and the loud bits would destroy you, make it quiet enough that the loud bits are fine and you wouldn’t hear the quiet bits. Almost all recordings, even classical ones, have compression for this reason. And used sparingly, we don’t even notice, because we expect to hear the loud and quiet bits clearly and our ears actually compress by themselves at high volumes.

Compression has more tricks to reveal. Weird little controls labelled “attack” and “release”. What do they do? Attack tells the compressor how long it should wait after it hears a loud sound before it actually reduces the volume of the loud bit. So if you set it to a second, the first second of any loud sound gets through unaffected before the compressor cottons on to you and ducks the volume down. In practice, a second is too long. Reduce it to between 20 and 60 milliseconds or so and you get this great loud and punchy spike at the beginning of each loud part, but then the compressor kicks in and keeps the rest of the volume manageable. That initial loud spike grabs the attention of your ear and makes them think “Oh! A loud bit! This is cool.” Except it’s not actually loud for the rest of the time. It’s just a trick.

The release knob tells the compressor how long after it’s stopped hearing a loud sound it should wait before it stops clamping down on the volume. This knob is really difficult to get right, mainly because even after years of mixing I often can’t tell the difference. But sometimes I can, and there’s usually a setting that “feels” good even if I couldn’t tell you exactly why I prefer it. But for a simple example, imagine Drummer boy is hitting the bass drum 4 times a second. If I set the release to more than a quarter of a second, the compressor isn’t releasing its grip on the volume by the time the next bass drum hit happens, so it will never give me the punchy attack I want: it’s operating too slowly.

Compression is hard to get your head around, Again, turn this up and you’ll hear what’s happening better:

03 Compression by Cirrusband

Really, EQ and compression are the two most powerful mix tools you’ve got – you can shape the sounds hugely with these two, and mixes have been done without anything else. There are other effects that can get pretty fun. Reverb is one, echo is another. Reverb is important – without it the sound is dead, and has no context. We’re not used to hearing no reverb. The first time I stood in a totally dead sounding room was the weirdest thing I’ve experienced. People next to me sounded 10 meters away, yet I could hear the slightest whoosh of air from a closing door. Or a sphincter. No hiding in there.

So, those are the most important tools. Next week, I’ll talk through the actual mixing of one of the songs on the EP.

Hold on to your cats, it might be a wild ride.

The bit that isn’t technical or easy is the performance. Vocals need to be as convincing as they are well executed – when we listen to music, we have a whole section of our brain dedicated just to listening to voices. And not just listening – we judge those voices based on timbre, pitch and delivery, even before we get into what’s actually being said.

It’s harder to get it right in the studio than a live show. Watching a live vocalist brings the rest of your critical brain into play too, watching the expressions on the singer’s face and the way they move to the music.  With our singer it’s quite easy to tell that yes, he’s into it, and yes, it’s moving him. He sings from the heart. The fact he’s grabbed YOU by the cheeks and is trying to sing straight into your soul is a clue.
On record, all we have is a voice. That voice is the most important thing on the record, because it has to reach through time and space and move you, the listener. And that voice is naked. You can hear any wavering notes, any off key moments, and you will hear them because your brain will draw them to your attention – “HERE! HERE IS A WEAKNESS!” I promise you, if the singer is going through the motions, you’ll be able to tell. How can you be moved by a recording of someone who isn’t feeling moved?

Our singer is called Whitty. I’ve never met anyone even remotely like him before.

My favourite ever Whitty recording moment came during the recording of our last EP – Whitty had his first go of opening track “Poker” and it was pretty good, but didn’t quite have the attitude. Chris, the recording guy, told him to give it some more bollocks. Whitty took his trousers off for the next take. He was literally hanging it all out there for the world to see, but for the slight obscuration by speakers, a bunch of wire, and a mic.

He delivered that vocal to us.

The man takes it seriously. He gets pumped up. He stretches. He does his best at times to be insufferable because he knows it’s a performance just like any other. His worst takes would shame most people.

With a strong vocalist like Whitty there are two main things to be judging in each vocal take, and I try to keep them in my mind as I’m choosing vocal takes, cutting lines and phrases, looking for the perfect vocal.

Pitch and attitude.

It’s natural that when singers get excited, go for the high notes, or try to create tension, they’ll place parts of their melodies slightly out of tune. It’s not bad or wrong, it’s one of the ways a good vocalist expresses himself and sounds human. It’s the reason I hate autotune – remove these “mistakes” and you remove the soul.

Sometimes you’ll have a part that is sung to perfection in one take, and with complete attitude and conviction in another take even if the pitching isn’t as good. You’ve got to decide which one is better, leaning as far as you can into the realm of soul and guttural truth without sounding like a wild pack of dogs barking into the night.

I like to think that me and Whitty are two people balancing each other on the line between genius and madness, but I’m never quite sure who’s on which side.

- Angus Young, Feb 2011
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What is my all time favourite movie moment?

It isn’t the pivotal scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the bone thrown into the air cuts seamlessly into the spacecraft. Nor is it the beach assault from Apocalypse Now. Nor even is it Captain Kirk shouting “KAAAAAAHHHHHNNNNN!!!!!!!!” across the vacuum of space. No, nothing that epic. For me, it’s when Mr Bean gets up to do an improvised speech about the painting “Whistler’s Mother” in Mr Bean: the Movie. For some reason the idea of talking about guitars makes me think of that scene.

“Hello, I’m guitarist Josh…

…apparently…

And my job is to make noises by hitting the guitar.

What can I say about guitars? Well for one thing, they’re very loud. Which is good. Because if they weren’t, then hardly anyone would be able to hear them.”

Guitar has become ingrained in culture as an icon, artefact, and status symbol to those who care. It’s hard to work out what to say about it. Everyone has their own ideas ranging from the noise a guitar is supposed to make, to the faces you should pull when you do a solo. Here’s my favourite guitar. It’s a Gibson Explorer from 2007 I believe. Nothing that special, I changed the stock pickups for slightly smoother and smoky sounding ones.

I think my outlook is a little different from some other guitarists. The guitar is seen as the instrument – the thing you either coax beauty out of or wrestle with, depending on your outlook and style. I don’t think of the guitar as my instrument. My instrument is the amplifier.

The guitar amp is even more important than the Electric Guitar. Without the amp, there is no “Electric” anyway. I said last week that the bass guitar sounds recognisable no matter what you plug it into. The same can’t be said of the guitar. Its natural tone is thin, twangy, honky… it’s just bad. It’s the amplifier and speakers you plug it into that make it sound full, thick, aggressive and alive. Don’t get me wrong, a good guitar is better to play, but given the choice between a shit guitar with a great amp, and a great guitar with a shit amp, I’d chose the shit guitar every time. Some players are famous for their relationship with one guitar, their “signature” model. I have a relationship with my amp. It’s the one constant in all my sounds.

This is my Vox AC30. It’s a new model (2007) that I’ve made some alterations to so that it responds to my playing the way I want. It’s got a chiming clean sound with a rich tone. On its own it is a little brash sounding but that’s because it’s designed to sound good in a mix with bass and drums – the brashness ends up sounding clear and forward. Famous AC30 users include the Beatles, the Edge, Brian May, and Peter Buck, but it’s been on so many records I couldn’t list them. It’s not a very cool amp – it looks more like a piece of furniture from the 1950’s, because that’s when it was designed. Often, bands will pretend to play through a wall of screaming marshalls, but behind them the sound will actually be coming from one unassuming AC30. It’s believed the quintessential guitar riff from Smoke on the Water was recorded with an AC30.

When you turn it up magic happens, as with most decent guitar amps – it’s what makes them so important to me. It distorts the sound, runs out of power and squashes the tones so even the quietest note you play seems to jump out of the speaker. The high end fizzy sounds smooth out, the bass seems to tuck in like a jet plane’s undercarriage, and the amp sings. Maybe it’s screaming because it’s being pushed so hard, but it’s my favourite sound, and the way it responds and changes the feel of my playing influences how I play. It’s a symbiotic relationship and as I’m writing about it I’m thinking to myself I fucking love this amp. It’s like the relationship between a loyal dog and his owner. Except I think I’m the dog.

This is the amp in all of our recordings. Recording a guitar amp is a strange process because what sounds good in the room doesn’t seem to come across easily on record. Without touching the amp’s controls at all, just by moving the microphone on the speaker, you can go from a sound that’s muffled and dull to one that’s completely harsh and ear piercing. Somewhere in between is the sound you’re looking for. It’s a testament to how bad guitars naturally sound that they need to be plugged into amps that completely distort and mangle them to give us something usable. And the most commonly used mic to record guitars throughout the world is the Shure SM57 – there’s two in the picture below. It’s not a transparent high quality mic. It completely colours the tone of any sound you record it with. You can get them new for £60, which when you compare that to one of the industry standard vocal mics (at £1200 for the basic model) is nothing at all.

Those who have seen me live will think yeah ok, he talks about his amp, but what about his fucking stupid rack of effects? Don’t they play some part in it? Those who have helped me lift said rack will probably get angry at this point. What’s the point in it? Aren’t they important?

Yes, they are. I love effects. I love the variety of sounds you can create – the ambient washes of noise, the sense of depth you can make. But they, just like the guitar I’m playing, all feed into the amp. I guess it’s all one big instrument.

It’s a lonely life recording the guitars because I’m there by myself, wearing two hats at once – the performer’s hat, and the engineer’s hat. I find I’m good at doing both things at once because I’ve done that as long as I’ve been playing guitar. Where I suffer is that I lose perspective. By which I mean, I might get a great tone and play well on a song, but it’ll be the wrong tone for the song and then I need to go and do it all again. That happens regularly. If we had a producer he’d probably keep me right but he’d have to get his hat back from under the performer’s and engineer’s hats on my head.

It is fun though. Guitar recording lets you get creative, and I like to treat the basic drum and bass tracks as a blank canvass. I never just play the part I play live. I always record different sections, layer different tones and doubles, experiment with effects, and above all else, I improvise. I don’t do that much live, but in the studio with time to spare I absolutely love to let loose and just see what accidentally comes off my fingers. And because I’m the one mixing it, I can really do what I like. No one but me will decide whether it makes it to the final mix, or even if anyone but me will ever hear the results.

You can see why I lose perspective.