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Wow, this is our last week in studio; in hindsight the past three weeks have flown by at an insane rate; all drums, bass and rhythm guitars are in the bag, so Lez was flown in on Sunday evening to start vocals on Monday. We started out with what’s probably the most challenging song vocally, a power ballad called “Inside Out”. Once that was nailed, Travers and myself set about laying down some acoustic tracks to flesh out two of the songs. Tuesday was much more productive; Lez put down some amazing vocal tracks for “Something To Say” and “Run”, after which I took on my guitar solo for “Maybe It’s Me”, which is now a bit shorter but still nice and punchy; it took me a couple of hundred takes but the end result is niiice! Much to our horror we discovered that some of the rhythm guitar tracks were slightly out of tune on “Maybe It’s Me” right after Lez laid down the vocal tracks, due to the lighter strings we’d put on Travers’ guitar. So after a quick re-string, we had to waste about an hour and a half redoing these parts, but it was well worth it because the takes we got out in the end were AWESOME!! We ended off the day doing some vocal harmonies for “Run”, which was a lot of fun and a good couple of laughs…I was even chased out of he vocal booth at one stage, but after about fifteen minutes of nursing a bruised ego I decided to give it another shot and laid down some decent Def Leppard-esque harmonies on top of the uber-kickass ones Theo had sung (the guy has a phenomenal ear for harmonies!). We stumbled out of the studio just before 11pm and then proceeded to get horribly lost due to road closures and a GPS faux pas (don’t even ask…).

Today we spent some time doing the vocals for “Fuelled”, “Lift Me Up” and “Theory” and Travers knocked out a killer guitar solo for “Fuelled” right after I laid down the lead-rhythm part, after which the lead riff and guitar solo for “Something To Say” was tackled and thrown in the bag. It was another long day so we decided to head to the nearest pub that the GPS could pick up for a cold one or two and ended up at a dodgy little place that looked like it was frequented by AWB types…scary shit! AND we ended up lost AGAIN on the way home thanks to road closures…fun times! We still have loads to do tomorrow and Friday, as these are our last two days, so I’m gonna hit the hay…adios, my hard rockin’ amigos!

Clint

We left East London by car at 5am on Sunday, all was smooth sailing except for the part where we almost ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere, driving around on fumes trying to find a gas station. The trusty ol’ GPS directed us to an abandoned tractor garage that looked like something out of “Deliverance” (Cue duelling Banjos), on some dodgy back road with four fuel pumps outside which clearly no longer worked (the cobwebs were a dead giveaway), much to our (mostly MY, it was my car) horror. Anyway, we eventually figured out that we would’ve found a filling station with functional petrol pumps (!) about 17km down the road. Facepalm. Anyhoo, we eventually arrived at about 6pm without further incident, only to find that the accommodation we’d arranged had fallen through, so after another 2 hours of driving around, phoning and general panicking, we finally managed to find a couch to crash on at my friend Keren’s place (thanks Keren, you saved our lives!!).

First day in the studio was WAY better than the trip up and our subsequent accommodation woes; Charles, Theo’s assistant had done an awesome job editing the drum tracks which had been recorded the previous week and we were ready to get cracking with the rhythm guitar and bass tracks starting with “Fuelled”, an oldie but a goodie. We managed to find a killer guitar tone almost instantly and after trying a couple of the guitars lying around the studio, I finally settled on a ’60 Les Paul Goldtop (which I’ve been trying to convince Theo ever since to trade me for my Epiphone LP Standard, but so far no luck..haha) for the song. Most of the kinks in this song as well as the next song we put down tracks for, a relatively new one called “Erase You”, had been worked out in pre-production so we managed to breeze through both relatively quickly. A few of Steve’s bass parts were tweaked a little so that they work better with the drum tracks, other than that, the songs were left pretty much unchanged.

Today we worked on “Inside Out”, a song that we’ve reworked a bunch of times but have never really been happy with until now. Theo got us to up the tempo and write a new bridge, the idea for which Lez mailed though to us earlier this morning and which is sounding uber kickass now! Next up was “Lift Me Up”, which has changed quite a bit from the original idea; the tempo has been kicked up a few notches and most of the song was re-arranged to make it more appealing to a radio audience. Both songs are potential singles so we’re very keen to hear how they turn out. Finally we took a crack at one of Trav’s new songs, a raunchy rocker called “A Little Bit Of Something”; finished the rhythm guitars before we decided to call it a day, tomorrow El Stevo will tackle the bass before we move onto the next 2 or 3 songs.

It’s 19:20 now and I’m already keen to hit the hay, this Rock ‘n Roll stuff is hard freakin’ work!! Laters, boys and girls, our toasted sammiches are ready…

-Clint