Studio diary: day 8

Greetings, people of the Earth! We come in peace (but are quite loud).

Having found a tiny gap in Timo's overbooked agenda, we gathered yesterday in the studio to continue tracking bass lines (you know, that mighty "Broummm!" you can sometimes hear on our records). Getting there was not easy at all, Berlin looked yesterday more like Stalingrad than ever, with a heavy snow blizzard and almost no visibility at all. Grrrreat! I think we should call this album "Snow", "Siberia" or rather "White Shit" or something like that... hmm, I sorta like "White Shit", I'll write it down on my list of possible titles.

And so a little later, while Daniel and I were testing a new Telecaster to use later on, Timo arrived looking like Star Wars' Emperor Palpatine, black robes, hooded and mumbling somthing about shit weather and fucking traffic... our lovely bass player was finally there!

Daniel had set up everything beforehand, so it was a quick start, which was good, there were lot of songs to do. We started off with "Twelve Years" and as usual, the first one of the session is always the trickiest one, especially if your fingers are cold. After a few takes (and gives) we were all satisfied with the result and could move on to the next ones, "Don't Lose Your Head", "Instead" (where the subtle difference between a minor and major chord led to some discussions on the right way to approach the bass lines) and "Vertigo", all of them done pretty quickly otherwise.

"One Another" almost drove Timo crazy, because it's so new we all still don't know the song structure that well, which means that it's either a complete perfect take or punching in can become a drag ("Where the fuck am I? Second verse? First half of the second bridge? Where do we come from? Where a re we going? Is there life out there?") You can imagine...

Thanks god we are blessed to have Daniel around to tell us stories about his life as an engineer, which I can tell you, made us laugh like hysterical hyenas for minutes and minutes. Something along the lines of setting up mics the wrong way, trying to get the perfect mic sound out of an unmic'ed source... hilarious. He could write a book. Maybe he should. As long as the word "Schminke" is in, of course...

Anyway, we still had two songs to go and little time, so we put on our focused faces and went straight into "Talking To Nobody", which Timo really nailed. Left was only "Eye In The Sky", with Timo's spotlight moment, so we had to really get that one nicely on tape. Which, after a few tries we did. And before we'd noticed it, it was half past nine, and time to wrap up and go home. Well, before getting home we still had to battle our way through Stalingrad's streets, which is not always easy when it's dark, icy and on top of that you can't see shit because you're short-sighted. A truly amazing combination, indeed.

But we managed to finish all the bass parts and now we can focus exclusively on more guitar work. Of course, after a few days we'll hear out a thing here and there that might need fixing, but that's just detail work. Timo did a great job yesterday, now he can sit back and laugh at me while I try to get my guitar parts right. Damm.

St

Songs recorded (Feb 2):
Twelve Years: bass
Don't Lose Your Head: bass
Instead: bass
Vertigo: bass
One Another: bass
Talking To Nobody: bass
Eye In The Sky: bass