18 May 2006
One of the themes of this recording session is the Poncing of Free Equipment. Chief Ponce is Dan, who has more exacting standards of what facilities we should have in our yellow room than we do, and also believes that the cause of Aqualung's third album should have all pro-audio manufacturers pleading to have us use their equipment. So he's been making calls, and instructing Manager Phil to make calls too, and this morning we are greeted with A Splendid New Microphone from our friends at Brauner.
We are intrigued to hear what it does, so we record the acoustic guitar on Vapour Trail again with it for a direct comparison, and are pleased with "its detailed low-mids". Perhaps it will be good for vocals?
Shortly after this a man from Focusrite comes along to show us the next generation in silliness, the Liquid Channel. It's the same principle as the virtual instruments I've been droning about, but this is a hardware preamp that then pretends to be loads of other preamps and compressors (which is almost as strange as an actual guitar amp that pretends it's loads of other guitar amps). It's not really what we need, which is classy eq, so he leaves us with another unit that incorporates classy eq. We plug it in but Dan is defeated by the sheer number of knobs so we give up on it and the quest for freebies goes on.
Next it's time to play some electric guitar for the first time. We discover that our lovely new Brauner mic is not really designed to cope with guitar-style volume so we try out all the other ones. We settle on the M149, if you're interested, one of the painfully valuable items Matt has borrowed from his mysteriously absent friend Stuart.
Dan is a particular aficionado of electric guitar sounds and begins muttering darkly about how we don't have the eq we need or the amp we need or indeed the guitar we need. Not for the first time in my life I find myself growing very defensive and touchy about my beloved guitars. I only have three, but I've had them a long time and they've served me well so far. I've never been a guitar fetishist (I've never had enough money) and there are many classic guitars I've never played. I suppose you generally just make it work with what you have, and since playing music is about emotion it's not surprising a little bit of emotion gets attached to your guitar. Aggravatingly however, Dan does know what he's talking about so I'm going to have to listen to him.
