Dead Sea Souls

I’m starting work on a song for the band Dead Sea Souls, a band from Whitburn in Central Scotland who I went to see recently at The Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh. The band inspired a great audience reaction and I aim to capture that vibe in their debut single ‘Natural Progression’ when we start work later this week. The song has a rousing chorus and though they don’t sound at all like them their energy is reminiscent of early Big Country. The line up of the band is 2 guitars, bass and drums. The band were introduced to me by my new trainee engineer at Offbeat, Iain Beattie. I’m looking forward to working with a band again. The last one time I worked with one was in early 2007 with Edinburgh Indie/Rock band ‘Kiddo’.

Syncing film to music without timecode

Back on the case with the video for Kirsty’s debut single ‘Feels Good’. I’ve been experimenting with how to sync the film to sound and have come up with a method that works quite well without the benefit of a camera that has time code. It’s a bit time consuming and it involves chopping the song up into seperate parts. eg: in this case the track arrangement is

*a- Intro , *b -verse 1, *c - verse bridge, *d - Chorus 1, *e - Solo, *f -verse 2, *g - verse2 bridge, *h - chorus 2, *i - end solo

When filming, I had preceded each of the audio parts of the arrangement with a one bar (four beat) click. Working on the intro I shot four angles simulating a four camera shoot using the built in mic of the camera to capture the audio. Because I shot it in the music studio I was able to use Logic to play each part of the song back, alternatively on location I could have used a CD Ghetto blaster (or Ipod with speakers) with each track on the CD being a part of the arrangement as outlined above.

Once I had recorded my four angles for the intro I was keen to see how it worked in Final Cut so I captured the takes as seperate clips and edited then down using the last of the 4 clicks as a cue. I created a film sequence on Final cut named Intro to correspond to the audio clip. I then imported the same chunk of music, again editing it to the last of the 4 clicks. Using a great function on Final Cut called multiclip I was able to view all four clips at the same time, doing some fine editing to make sure they all synced up. Then while reviewing the clips I clicked on each clip that I wanted to see in the master editing window until I had a complete take of the Intro I was happy with.

To cut a long story short I then repeated this process for each seperate segment of the song/film arrangement and at the end I bounced each part into a master programme with the full version of the song,  I then stitched the edited (bounced) film parts together for a seamless end result. The only thing to watch out for here is to make sure your film clips slightly exceeds the length of the audio part. This way you have the necessary cross fades into each subsequent part of the arrengement. If it’s too tight the edits will be too short and you will have to go back a few steps to sort it out.

Keeping each segment of the film as a seperate sequence makes it easy to go back and re-edit any part that needs adjusting though, just re-bounce the file and place it back in your master programme.

Allie Fox - album editing

On Friday Allie was back in the studio for the continuing editing stage of the album. We were working on the excellent ‘Mystery Of Life And Death’, a classical style track based on Allie’s acoustic guitar, Ron Shaw’s cello and Rod Clements slide guitar. The session was fairly intense as we waded through lots of takes by Rod and Ron and reducing them down to 2 basic finished parts. As it’s quite a long complicated track this wasn’t an easy job and keeping a patient attitude to the editing was really important. After 4 hours we still hadn’t fully completed the edits so we decided to call it a day and come back to it fresh next Monday. Monday 28th is also Allie’s birthday so that should be a fun session!

On the last track we edited I decided to add a one note organ to the end of the song. After doing that I realised I was on a track with the amazing Rod Clements from Lindisfarne. Now I can add Rod to the superstar artists I have played with

J2 kids

The recording stage for Peaceful World featuring the kids from Dean Park primary in Edinburgh is approaching completion. So far we’ve had the best 12 singers in the studio in groups of four. The kids perfomed really well having been expertly coached by teacher and writer of the song Randy Pritchard.

On Saturday I went on location to Ratho Village Hall with 2 mics, a Yamaha mixer and a DAT machine to record a group of around 25 kids just to record the chorus of the song. Today the final 2 kids, who didn’t make it to the last studio session, will be at the studio to record their parts and then it will be time to mix and master the track.

Getting a big Tom sound

Someone once asked Phil Collins “How did you get that really big Tom sound on ‘In The Air Tonight?’.

Answer “I used really big Toms”.

Brit Award Nomination-Spirit Of The Glen

The album Spirit Of The Glen is in the final running for the NS&I Album of The Year at the 2008 Classical Brit Awards. To vote for the album please visit this link

http://www.classicalbrits.co.uk/voting/

Anna Jarosz

Had a great session with pianist and vocalist yesterday. She was composing music for a film based on the life of Scots poet Robert Ferguson. Anna invited a violinist named Marion and between them they came up with some great pieces of music which we completed in 5 hours recording. I first met Anna through songwriter James Forrest who used her on one of his songs entitled ‘Beauty’. I subsequently introduced her to Ric Tod who also used her singing on one of his songs too.

Ludicrous Liquorice - Iains Weblog

This week sees the release of the debut single by Ludicrous Liquorice on the World Citizen label. The track entitled ‘Walling At The Party’ was co-written with lyricist and vocalist Ric Thomson. I recorded the music and produced the single which is a straight ahead club/pop song based on a melody and bass line written by Ric. Ric and I have been doing a series of songs over the past year or so this way, usually using different vocalists until I put Ric’s voice through a vocoder for a song we recorded together called Liquid Love, which is scheduled to be the follow up to ‘Wallin’ if the track does down well. Liquid Love also features Offbeat artist Kirsty on vocals along with Ric and is far and away my favourite of all the songs I’ve done with Ric so far. Initially ‘Walling At The Party’ is now available on Itunes and is being heavily plugged to 450 UK radio stations over the next 6 weeks. The other tracks done with Ric remain in various stages of completion and are eventually planned to be placed with other artists.

Kevin MacLean - For U - Producing from a demo

The debut single - For U - by Kevin Maclean is nearing completion after four weeks work on the project for Plaque Records.

The song is turning out great having done 2 versions of the production. One based on the demo arrangement, which the label requested, and one of my own arrangement and production of the song.

Quite often the artist/label gives me a brief for the production which I follow but if I think I have a better idea for the production I always follow that idea too and in time the artist/label can choose which version they want to go with. Working this way means there no need to get into heavy arguments about whose idea is best during the creative stage of the recording. I get to produce my own uncompromised vision of the track and also supply a production as close as possible to a brief if one is given.

Sometimes both versions allow for different promotional possibilities for the record.

Allie Fox - New album

Work has stepped up on this amazing guitar based instrumental album. Last week we had Fraser Speirs on harmonica which was an inspirational session. Fraser lays down completed and produced takes which are an engineers dream, completely off the cuff. We also had Elisa Carthy’s producer and MD Ben Ivitsky on whistle and viola on two tracks. Now that all the guests have completed their parts we are now into some heavy editing sessions prior to mixing the album which has been in the making since 2003!