It's Been A Long Time Baby.

Fuck, what a week!
Ok we went up to Auckland on Sunday. I got picked up on Saturday, I'd been fighting with Heather and not told her of the exact timing, so I got up and pissed off, just as she was in bed wanting to talk. Go Joel! Fucking aye! So yeah bad moves there, but we've done the whole --Break up but still friends-- thing. But that didn't happen till I got back from Auckland. I didn't tell Heather where I was going, who I was staying with or give a number, not as a straight fuck-off but as a more "i'm only 19 this shit's getting a wee bit heavy", still bad move.

Having said all that, the trip up to Auckland was fun. We got up at 7, at Duncan's dad's place, finding out of David Lange's death. We piled into the car at maybe 8:30? and cruised off up the North Island. Making fun of town names and stupid slogans was theme of the trip "You're so excite-a-bull! Don't be so predict-a-bul!" so much fun! But the fun went up a level when we stopped in Taihape and brought up about 50 past-use-by-date beers, being imported Brazillian beer which had been kept in the chiller, meant it was some of the best beer i've had in yonks. So the rest of the trip is a bit of a blur, consisting of lots of pissing stops, suggestive shots on the tank at Waiurou and fuck-loads of bad jokes with accompanying raucous laughter.

Arriving in Auckland we relied upon the iffy memory of Bernie and Brad to find our way to our residence for the week. Having met Jed (MAINZ student, and old time Lester friend) we sorted out our temorary pad. Fitting four of us into one room was fun (Brad resided in the ill-named 'Porn room') and proved oderous after a while, possibly due to bad diet leading to BO? Who knows...

Anyway. The first day at the studio was really good. It took a while to set-up but that's to be expected, as you're not setting up drums everyday. The engineering students (Sam, Anthony, Ralph, Rachael, Jed and someone else I forget) started setting up the mics. They were good, the big sticking point being overdubs. Now for those out there who don't do the whole recording thing (why the hell would you?) i'll give a quick (edit. extra big and extended) low-down.

-The big debate centres around whether to record the band as a whole and or record them all seperately. Now if you recording as a band you save time, as recording the band playing a 5 minute song will take 25minutes individually (assuming they play it well and in time, which doesn't happen), which we will get to later on. The other big thing is that the band playing together has a spark which doesn't always get transferred when done individually. I've found that it sounds better when bass and drums atleast are recorded together. This of course relates to Rock n Roll and not orchestra recordings. Individually overdubbing tracks means you have more control. On the Alabaster Theatre tracks, the rest of the band is present on every track (The guitar can faintly be heard on the keys, drums everywhere etc.). Now if you're going to get a record of the band playing the song then that is fine, because a little bit of bass in the guitars is fine because it's the same bass recording. If your band isn't good\tight enough to get a good take, then it's much more important to individually record tracks, as re-doing the bass track over the drums can sound different if you have a majorly different bass track, so doing it seperately has its advantages.-

Anyway the engineers wanted to isolate the tracks. Which I saw as a bad idea as mentioned above:
a) Alabaster Theatre are good and tight enough to do the tracks together
b) It would take much longer
c) When you turn the amps up and chuck them in a corner, the ratio of wanted noise to leakage (other noise e.g. bass coming into the guitar mic) is so low, because you have the mic pointing at the amp and any extra sound must come through the amp to get in (Trust me, if done well it is neglible).

So anyway the previous EP was done by overdubbing and took months (not totally because of overdubbing, but it helped take ages) the result, didn't really sound good and was quite disapointing, as it didn't capture the really good songs that were recorded. So the band were totally against overdubbing to start with. Anyway we got the engineers to try recording the band and making sure the sources i.e. amps were as isolated as possible. How surprised were they when it sounded great AND there was little instrument bleed in other tracks. Hammering away at tracks for the rest of the day we got maybe 3-4 done which is pretty bloody good in the scheme of things (we were expecting maybe 1-2 songs per day). The basic songs (they weren't finished, needing bits an peices to make them 100%) sounded good and something that we could be happy with releasing to radio. Leaving at around 11:30am we were still pretty excited.

The next day we weren't in till 5pm (rather than normal 10:30-11am). So we walked around eating dunkin donuts (fucking aye! sooooo good!) and sushi, and not doing anything at all, rather just hanging out. Anyway getting back to recording, we jumped in and did another 3 tracks (thereby finishing our lowest expectations of 4 drum tracks and the higher one of 6 full songs). Which was amazing as in 1 1\2 days we did 6 tracks.

Debating what we were going to record was a big one. I was keen to get a particular song from the first EP recorded, but the band weren't keen. Apart from that I think everyone was very happy with the procedings, especially Brad and Bernie's finally sloting into the band musically.

Anyway blah de blah blah. We recorded heaps, from wednesday to thursday we did overdubs, adding extra nice bits to the songs among other things.

We had a gig at Edens Bar. Showing up at 7pm no one was there, so we waited up till one of the Chinese managers opened the place up. The first thing I noticed was that the mixing desk was behind the bands. BEHIND! I had no way to hear the mix coming out of the speakers (Not having a pair of headphones to use) and luckily we had another band (The Tuts) bring an amp and microphones, although the mics didn't show up till 9pm. So one song by each band and then Alabaster Theatre were on stage.
I think they did alright, they got an increasing loud support from the crowd. Keeping people there rather than going outside. I was told that it sounded alright, so yeah who knows... We got a bunch of people along who hadn't seen the band before.

The trip down wasn't anywhere near as eventful as the trip up. Lester and Bernie in particular were hungover and the cheap beer at Taihape was 2\3s of the way down the island. All in all we had some fun and got some tracks down which will be seen around these parts in the future!