It has been a long time since we last spoke.
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Here is an important and interesting update on what we have been doing for the past many few months.
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DRAWCARD RECORDING DIARY
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SUMMARY
AUG07
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DrawCard went into the studio for 7 days to record their debut album with producer Alex Markwell. By Sunday it was sounding great. All that was left was a few vocal tracks and final lead guitars.
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One week later, I contacted the studio to access our files so we could take them offsite to record the remaining vocals and guitars at another studio. Studio said “…the files aren’t here” and I said “…well they have to be, we recorded them last week, and yeh, they will be there somewhere, call Alex he will find them”. I sat there anxious waiting for the return phone call or email, I was very hopeful about it all.
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Got the worst news ever within 20 minutes. Studio: “ Sorry to break it to you but someone must have come in here and deleted it from the drive!” GULP!
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Attempt was made to retrieve the deleted files from the computer but to no avail. We would have to record from scratch all over again.
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The finger began to get pointed, but we had to all forgive and forget, and reassure ourselves it was an accident and unfortunately it was against our favour.
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As you can imagine, we were all devastated. Now we had to book in more studio time and secure the services of our producer once again. And this kind of thing, like good shampoo, doesn’t happen overnight, but it did happen.
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We went back into the studio on the 12th October to start from scratch with drums, then bass, then guitars and so on.
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Today I am up late at night – have to head back down to Brisbane tomorrow to do some vocals and more guitars. Should be fun.
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I will check back in soon with a full diary entry of the recording from day one: Attempt one.
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Hope all is well with you.
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Take care
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Paul
dc
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Album recording - Attempt one.
13/08/07. We started recording at a cool studio in Brisbane, Australia called Wavelength. It is sweet, has lots of cool shit in the studio with a toilet that we weren’t allowed to do number 2's in because they linger - apparently. The place still, after a few days, ended up smelling like an ass (not a donkey). We were all immune to it, but any new person coming in would be hit with this muggy almost thick, humid air, which was a combination of noodle box, hot chickens from woolies, beer, lemon tea, beer, and beer.
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And beer.
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We weren't recording on an old wooden ship, but we were told the place smelt like Bigfoot’s dick, a far cry from the morning after shower and deodorise, which became a daily ritual (ahh that’s normal isn’t it).
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As with most recordings, drums were planned to be recorded first, so we dropped in to see our mate at the Drum Cartel to pick up a few different snare drums. It always good to have a variety when in the studio. We returned with two cool snares and an icecream, and I had a full bladder. So I did a pee.
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Joe, the studio owner popped his head in to say G’day (a common greeting used when meeting someone) and see if we needed anything. He saw the snares and told us he was a drummer and had a snare drum, so he lent that to us as well.
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The drums went well and after a few days we had smashed a few skins and broken the tape machine (an old skool way of recording which gives a vintage sound), but more importantly finished tracking drums. Andi was fucked and needed a beer. So we gave Andi a beer. He drank it. He was happy.
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In between drum tracking we would kick Mitch in the balls to wake him up to play some bass. We phoned up our buddy Matt from Repeat Offender to loan his sweet new bass, which had a nice warm sound perfect for recording. Matt is a lovely chap and happily lent us his bass in return for sexual favours, we were all more than happy to accommodate him.
Mitch spent most of the time sleeping on the studio floor, watching porn, dropping his guts then throwing everyone a FREE cupcake, and generally annoying others around him. Good times. Recording bass went well and sounded big. Had a few issues with Mitch’s new bass amp, only to be expected though.
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We decided it was time for more food and beverage and invested in a cardboard box full of tin cans with some form of fizzy black liquid and alcohol with flavouring to make it try to taste like it really is a dark spirit. And we got another cooked chook. Some pre-washed lettuce and potato salad and bread rolls. We all enjoyed a tasty nutritious meal and beverage.
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No sooner did Alex (producer) decide that my ADD was borderline as bad as his, and that this band he was recording all had problems with their bowels, did we finish drums and bass.
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Mitch and Andi felt such a weight off their shoulders they decided to get another case and disappear for an extended period of time – only to be found much later on jumping on the trampoline.
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Time for guitars – the fun part. Recording guitars is very rewarding and the songs start to come together with guitars. Alex had brought in some cool toys with him.
A 70’s Fender valve amp (which was the guitarist’s from Rose Tattoo for years), plus the usual MesaBoogie cranking through our marshall quads. We spent far too long jamming and finding a good sound until our ears bled. Alex figured out to get the Fender to sound good was to turn everything to 10(full). It was so fucking loud, we could use it as a weapon. There may or may not be video footage of Jesse shitting his pants. He was returning from outside into the big room which contained the loud amplifier. We were in the safety of the soundproof engineer room. I was a mean prick and decided it would be hilarious to wait until Jesse was walking past the amp and scare him with a loud ‘CHUNK’ of the guitar. Little did I know, and still don’t understand why he decided to lean down and put his head next to the speaker cab.
Jesse SHIT himself and almost fell over into the drum kit. I’ve never seen him move so quickly. Sorry mate.
In between guitars we decided we could begin doing some vocal tracks. It was late at night on day 5, I was wearing nothing but my jocks and a bandana. I felt very uncomfortable wearing clothes whilst singing. On stage, thankfully is different.
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We continued going back and forth with vocals and guitars until finally a few of the songs we almost complete, and sounding awesome!
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It was late on the final day and we all decided to call it a night. The plan was to head over to a buddy’s place for drinks, but by the time we packed up and loaded everything in the car it was 2am, and I was tired, from 7 straight days of late nights and mostly bad food.
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A week later I had contacted a good friend who had just moved into a house with a studio downstairs. Rob is a budding producer and has the tools to prove it. I organised with him to finalise vocals and guitars at his studio, with plans to head back to Wavelength to mix it. It was a deal.
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The Dreaded Day.
I contacted Joe at Wavelength to see if we could drop around in the morning on the way to Robs, to download the recordings so far and take it to robs.
He informed me that there were no files on the hard drive that looked like ours. Remembering the stupid shit Alex and DC were coming up with to name our files, I thought if Joe calls Alex he will find what we are looking for.
The return phone call was the worst news I have heard in a long time. All files had been deleted and we would have to start from scratch. No back-ups, end of story.
What the? That kind of shit just doesn’t happen, does it?
We were devasted, for lack of a better word.
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Album Recording – Attempt Two
A month later we managed to get in touch with our producer again to lock in some more studio time, and in no time we were back in the same studio doing it all over again.
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It was deja-vu when we dropped in to see our friend at The Drum Cartel. He was gob smacked to learn that we had to do it over again. Ahh well, life goes on. So we did, this time around tho it would be much more tedious, we would do two days in a row then have a week or two before we could get back into the studio, so it was not as much of a smooth flow as the first time around. We managed to retrack everything (long story shot hope you know) and in many months we nearly had everything finished. Our manager told us the good news that Silvia Massy (I dunno if I spelt any of her name correctly) would be mixing the album, that’s great, but now we had a ridiculous deadline to meet, and with Alex now out of the picture to deal with his other commitments (which came as a surprise) we were on the hunt for a new engineer/producer to finish off the tracks.
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Enter Rob Merlini, all time sexy man with big hair. He was the Bees Balls, this dude was cool as. So we crashed his pad for a number of sessions and tracked and re-tracked some of the stuff we weren’t happy with, then we run out of time, and still had things we wanted to do, ahh well the pressure was on so we had to run with what we had. It was all there, but just fine tweaking and little musician idiosyncrasies were put on the wayside for the next album. So we got nude. WTF?
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On the way home we nearly hit a deer that decided to cross the highway. We were listening to our acoustic track, which we recorded live in the studio, due to time constraints, but it has a nice raw emotional feel, which we all like.
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Many years later…
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We finally get mixed tracks back from The U.S. and they fricken rad!
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So now…we master, we release, and we tour…finally!
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See you soon.
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