So the new record was done at home?
It was actually done in our own studio. Volume 1 was done in a mixture of all sorts of places. It was done in kind of a converted stable that Haydn Bendall had, then we did some in Abbey Road and finished it off in Colin's living room. And this one... I think that we realized that recording in Colin's living room had great results. You know, as long as you have nice quality gear you can just about work anywhere. So having decided that, it was just a case of, "Well, look at that big double garage out there that you don't use. It's just full of junk. And look at the room next to it that you just store coal in. Why don't we get converting." So this is the first album that we've recorded in our own studio, which was Colin's double garage.
That's great. What kind of gear do I think we've got over a lot of problems like that you have in there?
We have a Radar.
A Radar? [laughs]
Do you know Radar?
No, I don't.
Oh, you don't know Radar. Well, it's hard disk recording. 24-track [by Otari].
Oh, okay. I thought you were making a joke.
[laughs] So we can detect people coming up the drive there.
Well, you were saying earlier about recording at Colin's house and being afraid someone would come in the front door.
I think we've got over a lot of problems like that now because it's kind of a dedicated studio space. It's not actually his house. Before he had to give over the front half of his house and we had a mixing desk and some bits and pieces in one room and a mic stand in another room or in his hallway. But this time we had a dedicated space to do it in. It's a great luxury. It's better than throwing a thousand pounds a day at somebody else's studio.
And you can work in your jammies.
Exactly. You can sit there in your slippers picking your nose. It's a luxury not to have a clock on the wall that's going, "100 pounds, 200 pounds, 300 pounds, 400 pounds."
It seems like the record is a simpler record. I knew you were recording at home so I was thinking we might have another The Big Express on our hands, as far as a lot of stuff in the production.
No, we wanted to make a more stripped sort of record.
So there's a lot of single guitar rather than two-part guitar stuff.
What happens is people say, "Oh, that's nice stereo guitar." But, actually, a lot of the tracks where you think there is one guitar, it's an electric guitar with a microphone on the solid body, so you have just the sound of the strings coming out. Then you take a DI and treat that and that becomes the other channel, so you have a wide, schizophrenic sound. In one channel you have this very thin, ultra-present sound which you can't get down pick-ups, and that becomes, say, the left channel, for example. And over on the right channel you have a kind of fuzzy, deep, electrified sound which is the DI part of it treated. Then you blend them together and you can sort of put your head inside a four-dimensional guitar sound.
Did you have any trouble with time alignment on that thing?
No, because it's all happening as is. The DI is pretty instantaneous. By the time it comes down the mic it's the same time it takes to come down the DI. So I don't think we were changing phase or anything like that.
You guys recorded guitars like that first with the song "Beating of Hearts."
Yeah, that's right. That was also weird tuning on that one. That was every string tuned to the note of E. But yeah, we mess around with guitars a little bit.
There's a really great variety of guitar tones on this record and I was wondering if you have a bevy of amps at your disposal or...
No, I'm afraid it's a bevy of Pod, it's a brace of Pod we have at our disposal. Uh, it's probably the [Line 6] Pod then going out through my little Sessionette 70, which is a pretty crappy solid state amp. Or through Colin's bass equipment. Sometimes, if we want it with a little extra deep poke, we put it through his Gallien-Krueger bass setup. But it's usually Pod and, as I say, a lot of the guitar tones have this mic'd up-close, dead sound in there as well for ultra-presence. But yeah, I think we have to thank Pod for a lot of those tones. It's highly recommended. I think everyone whose tried one out has bought one. We also put a lot of stuff in the mix through it as well. A lot of drums went through it. Any keyboard things we probably put through it. Vocals went through it, guitars all went through it, bass went through it — you name it, it was going in there. "Stupidly Happy," the devil voice is singing through the Pod. Plus, we used a little bit of Pod on some of the mixes to give it just a very little bit of very smooth tube-y distortion on some of the vocals. "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love" I think had a little bit of that. So Pod, I think is one of those beautiful things that you can just about flatter anything when you use it.
So the whole CD was tracked to disc?
