Our windows face out into the narrow little sidestreet, and if you are the last to arrive, which I usually am because there are no tiny children in my house, you are greeted by the lovely sound of our music reverberating down the road like a little cloud. It's like half-remembered music from a dream except you can remember it very well, thanks.
Matt has asked Alonza [Bevan] to come in today and record the bass for Vapour Trail. This is the first time we've done bass properly so we have to go through another set of variables to find the best method. Dan has an interesting speaker simulator unit we're thinking of trying. It's designed to replace the noisy-speaker-mic-ing-up part of the process by allowing you to come out of the speaker output of your amplifier directly into the computer. We tried it with guitar in the first version of Outside and found it a bit overpowering. It sounded like you'd plugged the guitar directly into your brain. But it seemed like it might work well on bass, which often gets DI-ed anyway, but can benefit from being amplified. This would have been a fine plan if any of our amps were working. At one point there was a tower of three different amps all failing to work. So it got DI-ed anyway. Sometimes it can take so long to get a sound that it saps all enthusiasm for recording it. But we got there eventually.
After that we recorded acoustic guitar on Glimmer, which was much easier because you hardly have to plug anything in and wonder why you can't hear it.
