Plunge the depths....the depths of Hell.

Day One
The lads hit the studio with gusto today, I’m in the office

I believe they’re starting with drum recordings. My day is all about my evening – The Plight are off on tour with Cancer Bats tomorrow, so we’re gonna have some party drinking fun..there’s talk of fire.

I imagine much of today will be spent getting tiny details right with drum stuffs, I’m sure Danny’ll be reet though.

Day Two
Fuck, last night made today feel like a bastard.

It took me a bong just to get out of bed, another so I could get to work but even this usual Hangover Killer didn’t stop the vom from making an appearance. I told my boss I was really anxious about going into the studio, and had also had a bacon sarnie that morning, and don’t really eat meat..like, once a month on a pizza? So that's why i was sick..anxiety and an irregular food.

So, office job done, 3 vomits later and I’m on the train to Barnsley to see what they’ve gotten done so far.

God, Barnsley’s a bleak place – the sort of place where everyone’s got a car cos if they didn’t they’d go on a postal-style killing spree. Best £-Shops I’ve ever seen though, and the accent is funny-as-shit!

On arrival they were in the thick of guitar stuff, the drum work is done, the vocals we might’ve done later in the night once Jase got back from a gig, but instead we went out drinking.

A band from Doncaster, Revernance (sp?), were practicing as we were recording, so got to chatting with them, OK dudes, so when Jase + Gib (Jase’s flatmate) said they were all out drinking at a bad dance club we hit that shit!

Not even gonna go into details, but was a messy night.

Day Three
Bloody gorgeous day, this wasn’t going to be a day for vocals, and as I had work that night I decided to just excess it up. Me + Danny hit up the local Iceland for cheap bulky eats, then got really drunk, really high, went the Tops Off direction and hung lots on the sun-drenched roofs around the flat.

Popping into the studio occasionally to catch up with the silliness, and its sounding huge already. Clearly the best environment you’ll ever hear anything, but being able to hear so much depth to it is I guess a good bet it’ll still sound relatively phat on a my CD player.

I napped, Theo violated my sleeping self + will get his when we go on tour..

6pm train back to Leeds, home to ditch my bag and change out of the clothes I’d been in since the previous morning, shower and out to Jakes Bar for my evening shift. Again, I’ll skip the details, but things got Raw tonight.

Day Four
The shift didn’t finish til 4am, train to Barnsley 10 hours later.

Its Sunday. I believe 90% of the guitar stuff has been done and today they’ve been playing around with various technologies for the synth tracks, its sounding Ridiculous!

Theo keeps telling me I can’t smoke a bowl before doing vocals, but I know otherwise.

I suggest that we should record in order of song number, eg. 2, 3, 4, 5 (we’re ditching our first song!), mainly because songs 2 + 3 are easiest! 4 is a hard slog, and 5 is just insane. Fuck them, they can wait.

Theo demo’d me over these first 2 songs the week before we hit the studio, so I pretty much nailed it. 2 took about an hour, 3 a little longer, then my throat told me to chill out, so we left it at that for today.

Not soon after me + Theo got the train home.

Day Five
Work all day, then back across to Barnsley from work. Picked up some new shirts from Primark on the way so I’d have summat for the office tomorrow!

Studio was filled with good folk, the air heavy with self-satisfaction. And rightly so, the newly added synth parts (we really do need a keyboard person now, holler if you can help!) sounded frickin sweet up in the mix with it all.

After a quick beer run, I hit to booth to tackle my nemesises(?!), 4 + 5, a hard hitting double-whammy of the fast and the furious.

Jase thought the vocals were sounding even better than the day before, and he was really into those. Working with Jase has been amazing, the fact that he’s seen me in bands over the past bunch of years means I totally value his opinion on what the voice is doing, and I think I’m surprising him + Theo (no-one else in when we did the vocals) for the sake of pushing myself a little harder with these recordings. Got a much stronger idea of what direction the vocals should generally be in + totally can’t wait for the next gig!

Worth mentioning at this point that my voice was partially fucked from the day before. Meant my voice only had a limited time for this session. We got all of 4, and the bare bones of 5 nailed, the plan is to return one night next week to finish 5 then go over all the takes and sort the vocal sound out.

Me + Theo got the early train back to Leeds the following morning and harsh days of office life and Uni deadlines inflicted themselves on us respectively.

Jase put a Very rough mix of all 4 on my laptop so I could listen over it before going back in, and even this is sounding pretty damn good.

There’s a whole lot more mixing to do, but there’s every chance we’ll have something of a finished article in time for the gig next Friday – I turn 30 the day before, so think I’ll be getting very drunk.


I totally can't recommend Jase' studio enough, he's the most awesomely laid-back guy but at the same time fully Owning the production process. And drinks his tea in pint glasses.

www.myspace.com/jasonsandersonrecordingmixmastering

Right, best bounce - Leeds' newest supergroup, Black Fang, are playing their first gig at Bassment, and Lewis just text'd saying he can get me into the CancerBats gig..there's an afterparty at Santiago's that i'm clearly gonna end up going to if i get to the gig, but work is gonna be so painful tomorrow..then got a bar shift later that eve..i doesn't stop, i tell thi.
-steve