Recorded, mixed and mastered at 2 Degree Field’s band rehearsal room in 2003, Sowerby Bridge.

History

By 2003, it was clear that members of the band would be leaving. Alex and Ryan were heading out to University in different parts of the country, Pete’s family were also moving down south as well so it was decided to try and produce one last demo of some of the songs that the band were playing live and the idea was to self record and produce this.

While 3 tracks were slated, only Make it Grow was actually completed. Drums and bass guitar were recorded for the other 2 tracks but due to time constraints around people leaving, work, school commitments etc, there was only time to complete Make it Grow.

Unfortunately the recordings for the other 2 songs have been lost to the HD gods and I have very little memory of which songs we actually decided to put down. I have a feeling that one of them might have been titled Saviour which was a reoccurring live track but not sure on the other.

Recording sessions took place sporadically over 2003 at the bands Sowerby Bridge rehearsal room, if memory serves me correctly we recorded drums and bass all together (which is why 3 tracks of this were put down) and then concentrated on putting down the guitars and vocals etc afterwards. Due to mic setups etc it was easier to do it this way.

Recording rig / gear

A computer was lugged down to the rehearsal space with some M-Audio Delta 1010lt internal sound cards in. This gave us 10 in and 10 out recording channels to play with at 96KHz, 24 bit and this piped into Cubase SX (I can’t remember if it was V1 or V2 at the time.

Drum wise we used an AKG drum pack D112 on kick, c418s on toms, SM57 on snare and 2 x Rode NT3s as overheads.

Bass I think we took the output right out of Marcus’s Trace Elliot amp head.

Guitars were also directly out of Alex’s and Matt’s guitar heads.

Vocals were recorded with a Rode NT1A condenser.

Recording memories

I don’t remember too much from the sessions themselves, I remember it was very rushed due to the time frame and I remember that vocals were the last thing recorded. As the computer we had wasn’t the best and digital recording at 24bit 96KHz was very much in its early hay day and we had lots of tracks going, Ryan had to deal with multiple drop outs when recording his vocals. It would play for a bit then he would hear nothing in the headphones leading to a frustrated Ryan saying “Nah, it’s fucked Matt” (you can hear this on the remix above in the break down as it did get recorded lol).

I wish we spent a little bit more time on getting the drum sound better, on hind sight we could have recorded the speaker cabinets and put some room mics up as well but we did the best we could with what we had and the time we had as well.

Unfortunately Mike didn’t actually get to contribute anything towards the recording, I’m not sure if it was a time issue or if by this point the MIDI sound module that he had been using for keyboards had stopped working and there were no samples used in this song.

Mixing

Once the recordings had been done, mixing took place. I think it was mixed at the rehearsal room mostly but my memory is a little fuzzy here. The track was all mixed in the box with Cubase SX using the default VSTs that came with Cubase SX. For Alex’s verse guitar he described wanting it to be put into the background more, unfortunately I slapped on a little bit to much reverb to take the edge of it. Digital reverb at the time was not great and again very much in its infancy (also a massive resource hog for systems).

There could have been a little less reverb overall.

As Mike hadn’t managed to get anything down, I added some swells and chopped up vocal sample parts in while mixing. This was similar to what I did with the very first EP we did as a band. Mike ended up using some of them live from the sampler.

Again in hindsight, I wish we had got to add some keys into the song as well. There was no reason these couldn’t have been added as a VSTi potentially if the MIDI sound module was the issue and probably would have gone nicely.

Recorded 2002 at Beaumont Street Studios Huddersfield by Matt Burnard.

Mastered at Sunny Bank Studios

History

From gigs and work, we scraped together some money in 2002 to finally get ourselves into a ‘proper’ studio, Beaumont Street Studios to be exact, where Chumbawumba and Embrace had recorded previously lol.

We loaded up our gear and got to the studio location nice and early. I remember being slightly confused, and driving round a bit as the building itself had no signage on it. It was an unassuming Yorkshire stone building with literally no windows or way to figure out if we had the right place or not. We waited around outside for ages, it just so happened that the person running the session was late which added to the confusion about whether we were in the right place or not lol.

We’d booked in for a 12 hour session and aimed to do 3 tracks. We went over this time as there was still mixing and mastering to do as well. Like a lot of things, I remember the session being very rushed. We recorded drums and bass together live, no click track with some scratch guitar from Alex. We then went back and added guitars, keyboards and vocals over the top.

Grateful originally did not have an introduction, it was straight in to the distorted guitars through a swell. During the session, Ryan had the idea to add an acoustic intro to the song along with some vocals, which worked out and sounded great.

I think there was a part of Grateful that was actually missed out from how we played it live that was lost due to the time pressures of the session. I think they forgot to play it during the tracking of the drums and bass and by the time we realised it was too late to change it. We could have probably prevented this by preparing and laying out the structure and all the layers before hand but you live and learn.

In an ideal world, we’d have spent 1 week tracking and another week on the mix and master but alas, money was tight. We had lots of ideas, and ultimately not enough time to realise them all to the standard that we wanted.

The mix ended up generally ok but there are a few things we should have gone back to fix / fixed at the time. Listening to the mix in the control room, Mike’s keyboard parts were fairly prominent but for whatever reason these got pushed so far down in the final mix / master that you can only just hear them in Beneath during the intro. Live, these were a very prominent part of the introduction and song.

Packaging and Art

I feel that as a band, we followed a very punk, DIY ethos out of necessity. We didn’t have a lot / any money so if we needed something doing, we’d figure out the cheapest way to do it ourselves. Once the recording was done we needed to produce CDs to sell / send out. Pete did an awesome job of the cover art and design. Apparently the image of the head was produced by him sticking his head into a photocopier / scanner lol. I bought CD sticky labels that we printed on ink jet printers and stuck onto generic CDs that I burned. Inlays were printed and stuffed into jewel cd cases. We somehow managed to get a full CD manufacturing plant going for this, not that we sold many. Probably more were given away than actually got sold.