Writing and recording a song

Warning: this is a very long, tedious and self-indulgent post. Now read on.

Among the millions of emails I don’t get every day asking how I became so successful I must get literally none asking how we set about recording our fantastic and critically acclaimed debut album.

I figure that’s only fair to answer this resounding lack of interest by use of a 6000 word blog post and an example track – “In The End”, which you can hear over there someplace —->

The genesis of a song

First off, someone has to write a song. As the group’s primary songwriter, that’s where I come in. Songwriting is one of those weird occupations that typically has little structure. A song can literally pop into your head while you’re having a shit, or be the cumulation of 7 years bits and pieces that suddenly you realise you can pin together into a single unit of sound.

As such, there’s little advice that can be given on the subject other than: record everything you do. Until I put my phone through the wash the other week, I had 31 snippets of melody and guitar parts that had been recorded on it in a variety of locations  - including the sat in the car in a traffic jam. History is probably littered with amazing songs that were lost thanks to unwelcome interjections.

In this case the song is all about the riff. It’s a faint variation on the classic riff  you’ve heard on a million Quo records if you listen carefully. I arrived at rehearsal early one week and found myself playing it while I waited for the rest of the band to arrive.

Enjoying it’s hypnotic quality, I stood there literally playing it over and over for perhaps ten minutes… and then started to sing. As is so often the case, the melody just kind of… happened. By the time Fryer arrived to set up his bass, the basic song/chorus was complete.

And so he plugged in and began to play along. I’m pretty sure he’d nailed the bass part in a minute or two and it has remained unchanged ever since. He noticed straight away that there was no contrasting part. My solution was “let’s just play it like it is and keep it under 2 minutes” but he thought differently.

When we convened the week after, he’d got a bassline/chord progression for the “middle 8″ bit (although I don’t think technically it counts as such) which fit really snugly into the whole scheme.  Meanwhile, Brend realised that what would really set it all off as a piece of music would be some glam rock style drums.

With some fannying around with more singing, we’d cobbled together a whole song!

So you see, the genesis of a song can be fairly chaotic – taking in happenstance, deliberate thought, personal inspiration and thoughtful collaboration.

The Lyrics

Lyrics (as I’ve noted before) are a bitch. For probably a whole year when we were playing this live prior to its recording I just literally made up words on the spot. Generally that meant finding a mean-nothing phrase like “Sausages beans and an egg, all running down my leg…” that fit the metre of the tune and then repeating it with minor variations including badgers, coypus and meat pies (all recurring lyrical motifs of mine).

Eventually though, as a proper recording rolled up, I was finally pushed into a corner to write some lyrics. I hate lyric writing, but I was feeling vaguely political so I wrote something that reading it back is one of those bitchy, whiny self-interested rants about paying taxes to politicians and wishing that someone would set fire to Ed Balls or something. Although I do believe this is the only song in the world ever to mention “unbranded fish fingers”.

Make of it what you will.

In The End

Run that one by me again
You’re telling me you’re my friend?
With a hand in my pocket, a gun to my ear?
It’s a really unusual blend

Perhaps I’m just being obtuse
Perhaps you’ve got many a use
Normally you’d see I’m a really nice bloke
But there’s only so much I can lose

So burn down the House
We’re tearing up the streets
This land will belong to us all
And there’s no telling what you will meet
In the end….

You keep a picture of you by the bed
Keep the words that you said in your head
A convenient way to imagine I guess
All the things that they’ll say when you’re dead

So burn down the House
We’re tearing up the streets
This land will belong to us all
And there’s no telling what you will meet
In the end….

Liverpool, London and Leeds, from Bolton to Aberdeen today
Your long race is nearly run, thy will be undone today

I’m clambering over your fence
Please note the present tense
I’ve spent thirty odd years with a flea in my ear
So forgive me if I seem tense

So tie up the noose
Make sure that no-one gets lose
You can kick and you scream all you want
For you there is no further use
It’s the end….

Liverpool, London and Leeds, from Bolton to Aberdeen today
Your long race is nearly run, thy will be undone today
Like unbranded fish fingers or Give Us a Clue
Your era is ended and payment is due
All that you’ll be in a couple of years is a frown and shrug and a
“Hmmm wasn’t he…?”

Recording

Firstly, even though this was all recorded in a bedroom, you must understand that even this modest enterprise isn’t cheap. You can do it cheaper with computers and shit, but I know nothing about that.

The Drummer (bless his cotton socks) has stumped up probably around £3000 on recording equipment over the last 7 or 8 years. For this, he’s amassed a big lump of a recording desk which is home to bank upon bank of blinking lights and ‘faders’, some good quality microphones, leads and software which somehow interacts with all of this stuff.

The manual is a good 1500 pages long, so it’s no wonder that it took about 3 years for him to understand how to actually record something properly on it. During those 3 years I gained 2 stone and lost 3 inches of hairline, which shows how critical delays can be to making it as a rock band.

The basic principle is this: every recording consists of several individually recorded ‘tracks’ which are layered on top of one an another. So on one track you might have a guitar, on another the vocals and on another still you might have keyboards or another vocal.

Step 1: Backing track

There’s lots of ways to go about recording. Our chosen method was basically to record the basic song live and then overdub other instrumentation and vocals over the top.

The drums had 4 mics placed around them in various position to pick up the cymbals, toms, snare and bass drum on separate tracks so that later on we could make anyone one of them quieter/louder as required. The guitar was played through my standard live amp (make: unknown – weight: 3/4 tonne) with a mic in front of it. The bass, for reasons which escape me, was plugged straight into the mixing desk.

Because everything was being recorded live, it was important to record everything as separately as possible. If we got an ace version of the drums but I fucked up the guitar, it was critical to be able to re-record the guitar. “Leakage” between tracks can be a bitch to sort out.

I think the backing track we used was about the 3rd of 4 goes – but for some of the other tracks we had endless attempts at getting everything just right. The worst part was the break in the middle. When we play this live, we do a 2 minute noise breakdown, with effects pedals set for stun and I guess if there’s one regret I have about this track it’s that the break here is a bit of nothing in comparison.

Step 2: additions

Satisfied with the performance of the basic track, it was time to turn to the instrumentation as a whole. While the drum part couldn’t be much rectified after the fact (you might notice a minor fluff if you listen carefully) you can now add as many guitar parts, keyboards and nose flute solos as takes your fancy.

The bare-bones track sounded pretty decent, but I wanted some more fripperies on it so I brought in my semi-acoustic. It’s a piece of shit guitar that I bought for my 21st birthday and used through the glory years of the band, despite its inability to stay in tune throughout a single fucking song, ever.

One ‘good’ feature of a semi acoustic is that it’s easy to get it to feed back – creating a weird droney kind of effect. By hitting an open E chord and sitting near the amp, I created the whistling, ghostly noise that bookends the track. We actually recorded two tracks of feedback which kind of make a harmony out of it – a bit like the drone effect you get in Indian music.

Throughout this, the note of the feedback was wobbled using the whammy bar to make it more “interesting”.

More guitar tracks were added, which you can hear coming and going in various parts of the song. I’m pretty sure Dave re-recorded his bass part with a heavier sound to add more bottom to the song.

Finally, I had various stabs at recording the vocal. This is surprisingly hard, as you have to stand in front of other people singing with your hands in your pockets feeling like a fool. In the videos like Live Aid, Bonio wears his shades and massive headphones and gives it all passion and shit. Less easy to do that in a mates bedroom when you’re not wearing leather. And not a twat.

Mixing

Once you’ve got all the tracks laid out, it’s time to mix them. Which basically means find the ideal balance between the various instruments so the guitar isn’t too loud.. you can hear the vocals and so on. You can also add effects to the recorded sounds.

In this case, we stuck some reverb (fancy word for ‘echo’) on the main part of the vocals – making it sound a bit like I was singing in a small bathroom. It’s an effect you most often hear on John Lennon’s records because despite him being one of the greatest rock vocalists ever he hated the sound of his voice and would use reverb to hide it’s qualities.

On the middle-8 bit, we deployed an effect that we call “the telephone effect” but which presumably has a proper technical name. Basically it makes my voice sound like it’s coming down a telephone. Clever, eh?

It’s a fairly standard ‘psychedelic’ effect used to death on every second Oasis record and again can probably trace it’s genesis to the Beatles – on the latter verses of Tomorrow Never Knows.

After all this, the track was left to Brend’s tender ministrations. He spent the next couple of months listening endlessly to the track and making bits of it louder and bits of it quieter and various other buggering around kind of things until he (and the rest of us) were happy with the track as a whole.

Distribution

After all that, you bung it on a CD, turn it into MP3s and then put on the internet for not a single person to show any interest in. Meh.