Recording the ATC EP

At the end of last year, Todd, Martin and I went to Snug Recording Co. to lay down tracks for what would become my swan song as the drummer of Alright The Captain. The band had been a huge part of my life for nearly 5 years and it would not hit me until well into 2013, just how much this life event was guna shake up my world.

Hyperbole aside, the birth squeeze of Conversation Skills for the Socially Anxious was a fairly turbulent 6 month process and one that I have not really documented until now.

The legend that is Rich Collins helped us tack the short but intense 5 song EP in less than two days of live takes and a few over-dubs. We managed to put the whole thing down in a day and then spent a few hours adding some texture and polishing up some scuffs here and there. We were aiming for a record that reflected the live experience of the band.

After we got the tracks down and spent some time layering tasty plug-ins and re-amping the bass tracks, we banged them on a portable HD and I took them home to have a go at mixing and tweaking them in-house.

This part of the process was also important as we wanted it to be a full-on DIY job; a testament to what we could achieve on our own!

I was apprehensive about the whole thing as I was starting to realise how much this actually meant to me.

My daughter was born a month or two before we went into the studio and as I got my head around what it meant to be a father, it was starting to become clear just how much of an impact she would have on my involvement with the band and so I had to get this right. For my part, it had to reflect what I had achieved with this band as a drummer and also what we had achieved as a unit.

For better or for worse, I produced and mixed the tracks using Ableton Live as it is simply all I know these days. I've been told that it's not ideal for mixing on but I know the results I can get from it and as this was the biggest project I had worked on to date, I needed to use what I was comfortable with.

I arranged all the tracks in the same project so that I kept a consistant sound for all the mixing. Whilst I was there, I edited a lot of bits out and added some subtle glitches and bizarre intros to a couple of tunes.

Also I utilised Ableton's presets to great effect, placing some tasty chains on some of the tracks to get trashy sounds and noisy textures.

I managed to get a really pokey kick sound which I am particularly pleased with. It really bites at the speaker cone with it's top end whilst remaining big and rounded. Also I went for a really trashy snare sound, picking out the raspy snare with the bottom mic and running a brutal multiband compression on a send channel.

We took 4 or 5 different recordings from each guitar track, running it through multiple heads and mics, meaning I could blend these to get different tones for specific parts. I love the drop 2/3's of the way through Bolognaise Holiday where Martin's guitar goes proper twangy before kicking in with that grungy distortion.

I went to town with the send channels on this recording, mainly to blend effects in with the mix rather than slap them over the top and lose that warmth that Rich captured in the studio.

It was a massive learning curve and if I did it again, I would definately create and save a mastering chain and deal with each song in a sperate project. Especially on my 13" MacBook Pro, the whole thing felt unmanageable at times!

I used a few familiar features in different ways too, such as the markers which I added reminders and mixing notes to the songs so that I knew where I had put certain bits of automation (again, when the project is so big, it's easier to slap an effect on a channel or cut a part out and forget that you already have some automation going on)

Also I used the labels to make the project make more sense!

I learnt a lot of techniques during this project, (mostly through error!) but I also learnt to trust my instinct. I had a lot of other audio tech friends chipping in with advice which made me nervous. I found myself panicking that other audiophiles would trash the end result because the kick was too boomy or the cymbals are side-chaining or whatever. But in the end I decided that I had produced enough music of my own to know what sounded good and what didn't. Also I began to look back at some of the albums I knew and loved and found myself picking holes in their production, forgetting how much I loved them for what they were. For instance, RHCP's Californication is a terrible album, from a production point of view. Seriously, it sounds shite! But the songs are great...

...and in the end who really cares? What we wanted was a solid live album that reflected the noisy, chaotic sound we had perfected over the years of touring and writing and throwing stuff at each other in the practice rooms. The songs spoke for themselves and all they needed was a bit of 'umph' to get the message across. Surely this is what recording and production is about; capturing the moment of creation.

I am proper proud of the results we got and of the time we spent with Jamie (the new drummer in ATC) who sat with us and listened and contributed to the pot of ideas and opinions that lead to the way it now sounds. I am proud that my time as drummer for ATC has been marked with such a raucous set of songs that speak for themselves about how much fun we had making them.