I thought it was about time I posted on another band I'm involved with. This one is very different to King & Queen Of Sorry, so if you're expecting more of the same, you may need to broaden your horizons a little...
Ok, so here's the background to the project. Kathryn Marsh & I have been working on our acoustic band King & Queen Of Sorry since January/ February this year. We did a rough mix of our first track, but were clueless how to make it sound more professional. Jan Buchholz, a friend I've met through the excellent Six String Bliss forum, offered to have a go at mixing it, & we were delighted with the quality of his work.
When going through the producing/mixing process, I got to know Jan a lot better. We both love 70's / 80's hard rock, so we agreed to have a go at collaborating on a few tunes. Now I love and am very proud of the acoustic stuff I'm doing with Kathryn, but I'm a frustrated rocker too. I'd written a bunch of riffs which were being played regularly in the house, but nowhere else. So I sent off a batch of riffs with provisional song titles to Jan to see if there was anything he liked that could be fleshed out into a song. We used dropbox to exchange ideas & IM on Facebook to discuss the tracks.
The normal way we work is thus: Once we agree on a particular track to tackle I send off my guitar track - usually with a video too of me explaining the chords & being stupid in front of the camera. Jan will start by sampling different drum tracks, & we agree on which one works best. He then adds bass & his guitar parts - again sending samples all the way so we are in agreement. Once our parts are finalised we send the track off to my friend Andy Gregory to add one (or 2) of his mighty guitar solos. The man is a genius. Again the solos are dropboxed to Jan for mixing.
Once all the instrumentation is done, the track is then dropboxed off to Kathryn - usually with a guide vocal by me & lyric sheet. I say guide - that is a bit of an overstatement - vocal - stretching the bounds of credibility even further! Somehow from hearing my howling, she deciphers what its actually meant to sound like & sings it in her usual spectacular fashion, & we pinch ourselves for being so lucky to work with her. Then back it goes to Jan for final mix.
We're almost done on 3 tracks & track 4 is in the drum editing stage. No one is rushing, & there's no need to. We all have families & commitments so the emphasis here is on fun - as it always should be in music. We all get along well too. Once the 4 tracks are approved by everyone involved (& we get some artwork sorted) we'll release them as an E.P. The title of said E.P. has yet to be agreed so your suggestions would be most welcome. I favour "Maximum db" at the moment (do you see what I did there?)
After that - who knows? I'm hoping that at some point we'll add more tracks to our cannon & release an L.P. eventually. I'm loving it!
Me loving it too !!! :-)
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