Dan has spent a lot of the last few weeks on the phone trying to ponce things and also to get things fixed (the 149, the wireless router, the air conditioning unit). Slowly these things are being addressed. Today for example, we've been sent a replacement converter unit. This is the big black box that eats graceful curvy analogue signals and shits out jaggedy digital information that is tasty for the computer. It has a fan in it which for the last few weeks has been droning on and on in the background like Grandma about hoodies. At last this irritation is gone! But you can't really tell over the much louder drone of the broken air conditioning.
Anyway, this precipitates another bout of repatching. "You're good at that," says Dan, but I've got wise to this strategy so it is he that has to squat in Medusa's hairnet behind the rack for half an hour. I do the washing up instead.
Now I get to record some electric guitar on Rolls So Deep. We're still looking for a way to put a slight kink in the harmony, which we achieve by playing lots of major sevenths. It starts to sound a bit like one of those bands with two guitar players and is quite thrilling. There's no piano so far so the song sounds really out of place. I hope that doesn't cause it a problem.
Next is guitar on the song that isn't going to be called All right. It's a part I came up with in rehearsals that I particularly love playing. It ends up being tracked once through the speaker simulator and again through the little Fender amp and sounds somehow quintessentially 80s. Because this is one of the Space songs, I get the Memory Man out and do a track of swooshy. Otherwise how would you know you're in space? In the last few days Dan has become satisfied with the guitar sounds we're getting and we decide to stop trying to ponce expensive eqs.
In the afternoon we get onto Cinderella. I'd been a bit worried about this one since Matt said he was expecting a guitar solo at the end. There was also the question of the giant opening section which, on the demo, sounded like the theme tune from an 80's power cartoon. That's not always bad, of course. Imagine if it was like Ulysses 31!
In the event it worked best to have the pedal part be swooping up and down the octave like a tracer behind the hands part. The pedal actually sounds more like a synth than a guitar, so I tried to keep the relationship between both parts as clear as possible so that they were definitely linked. It was a bit of a headfuck.
Here's a thing about recording that's happened often enough that it can't be a coincidence: when you're playing something, especially a lead, improvised part, the very first time you do it is the best. It's like you haven't had a chance to think about it at all so it's pure instinct and luck. Happily we recorded my first take of the end, and I was still getting used to the combination of the pedal and the hands - it felt like spinning around holding a rope with a heavy weight tied to the end. It kept pulling me in unusual directions. I started going up the scale and suddenly hit a very unexpected note at the same moment as shrieking up the octave with the pedal. The next few notes were equally shocking and magical and then it all collapsed, with a sound like a somebody dropping a chainsaw onto a motorbike. But it was enough. We all looked round with the same sort of 'oooo' expression and played it back to see if it was really as exciting as it seemed. It sounded ridiculous. But also perfect, which is just as well because I could probably never do it again.
After that we got a bit excitable and started double and triple-tracking the guitar parts until we got a kind of guitar orchestra, especially enjoyable in the last chorus. Strangely Metal.
