Now that the song demo is completed and the lyrics all written, I have named the song “Feel like I feel”. The musicians to complete the project are Graeme Patterson on drums, Luke Eberbach on bass, Simon Harrison on guitar, Charlotte Barker on backing vocals and I will handle the keyboards.
The first musician to come in for tracking, was the drummer. To obtain that huge drum sound I’m after, I recorded in the soundstage, using the Rednet interfaces and Avid S6 desk upstairs, as the control room. Thanks to Tristan Meredith, our post production lecturer, we learnt how to record drums in the huge open space and the results were amazing and so full of life and energy. I used a huge array of microphones for this session and set up a Decca Tree microphone arrangement 3mts in front of the kick drum and over 6mts wide, to capture the spaciousness of the live room. I encouraged the drummer to play quite hard and expressive. David Turner has given me the tip of using these huge sounding roomy drums, but then edit them with triggered sound sources for the kick and snare and then reduce the tails on the delay, to obtain that classic, gated 1980s drums sound . David suggested non linear reverb.
Quite a few hours have been used comping and editing the drums using Beat Detective. Thanks to the tutorial by Luxe, in our studio class, the task was not as time heavy as it would have been without his tips. Dave Turner, our lecturer, noted timing issues in my edited drum tracks & this then required me to spend the bulk of my class studio time, aligning the rhythm to the grid. As I had already mentioned, in Nile Rodgers tracks, the drums & bass are the bedrock of his songs and therefore, it stands to reason, then needed to be absolutely “on point”. The other adjustment, due to class feedback, was my original intro and first verse, did not hit the ground running and had a classic production style, that built from verse to verse and needed changing. This was not the way Nile Rodgers approached his music. Because his background was in disco and dance music, he caught the listener from the very “get go” and introduced the heavy, catchy beat and bass pattern from the first few bars of his songs. this made it easy to cross over from Top 40 hits, directly to the dance clubs. I subsequently rewrote my intro to reflect this advice.
The next musician to come in to the studio, was Simon Harrison. I have used this guy on many sessions, as he is such an amazing versatile player. My brief to him, was to channel a funky sounding, thin guitar sound, that referenced both INXS and Nile Rodgers. Simon achieved this in spades, and improvised on the theme with a huge amount of usable takes. Unfortunately I had to narrow it down to just one final track, but I was extremely pleased with the outcome.
My next musician to record, was Santi Caballero. This guy is an absolute “gun” on the saxaphone. Over the years, I have recorded many great tunes with him & his professionalism and musicianship, is second to none. He channeled Kirk Pengilly (the original INXS saxophonist) to an absolute “T”.
The track is now really coming together and I am looking forward to the bass player coming later this week and rounding out the rhythm section.
Simon Reich Music 