"Don't Look" - The Recordings

On our last two demoed songs (Devil May Care + Rose in Dreams), we recorded everything the conventional way - setting up a click track, recording drums with demo guitar, then bass and guitars, and finally adding vocals and synths.


Now this is the easy way of doing things - you can polish up everything separately, and it's simple to add and take away things before and during the final mix. There's a lot of room for experimentation, and the engineer is always happy to have a clean and tidy project to work on. You can also easily fix up mistakes afterwards.

* * *

However, this is not without its drawbacks. For one, the entire beat of the song is anchored to the click track, and I've really come to hate the hell out of how that sounds. It literally sucks the life out of any band. How the band plays together becomes a minor consideration; if the band is shitty, using a click track can make it mediocre. If the band is amazing, they are brought down fair to middling. Many of the Pro Tools crimes rampant nowadays are because of this click track dumbassery.

(Admittedly some genres like electronic music may require a click track - in my opinion, rock'n'roll definitely does not)

Furthermore, recording bits and pieces separately takes the band out of the performance. When playing with a band, at the best of times you can get these wonderful moments where players communicate and react together, creating something from the moment that changes and elevates the song. No room for that in piecemeal recording.


Also, some songs simply do not work on a steady beat. Sometimes a song requires for the tempo to breathe along, speeding up and slowing down when needed. Don't Look is definitely one of these songs: We knew from the get-go that it would have to start quite slow, and then gradually speed up for the last chorus. So early on, click track was out the window.

Pekka, really exploring the studio space (sans cowbell)

Consequently we tried to look for a place that would accommodate live playing for this five song session. Fortunately Jaakko, as a student of recording engineering, happened to have an excellent location for us at his school in Orimattila, about an hour drive from Helsinki.


A big, pro-quality recording studio. We booked it for a weekend, and proceeded to set it up for live recording - bass, guitar and drums together in one room, no click tracks.

* * *

And what a room it was; I think I've never recorded in such a large space. Sounded great, though. We worked to isolate the amplifiers reasonably well to still get reasonably clean drum recordings, but of course there's always some spillover. No matter, the main thing was to get us all in the same space, playing off from each other.


It took us the first half of the first day to set things up, and then started feeling out playing and recording together. There was some slight nervousness at first, because we knew that if any one of us was having a bad day, it would affect everyone's playing. Also, we'd never played live in front of an audience with this line-up, only at rehearsals. After a few tries we started to find a footing. Withing an hour, we were recording for keeps.

Jaakko, chained to the mixing console.
The hard price of DIY - there's a lot of DIY to be done.

For myself and Pekka, this was probably the most enjoyable recording session so far, ever. I knew that nothing would sound as polished this time around as when recording separately, but everything felt immediate and fresh. Playing together was fun, and even though every song has their fair share of missed notes and mistakes, this sounded like a band rather than a computer.


Poor Jaakko, though - he had to pull double duty as a bassist and an engineer. On the next session, we have to get him in on the fun and have someone else to worry about the mics and cables.

* * *

In the end (and despite all my recording rants) a lot "Don't Look" was still recorded afterwards. I'm just not good enough of a musician to play and sing at the same time sufficiently well, so we booked later times for committing vocals. We got the verses of the song in with a couple of takes, but the chorus was a bitch to sing - I had to take time to look for the right approach in the confines of my vocal dungeon (bedroom), until I finally got it sorted out.


The last additions were brought to the song on Christmas Day, when I added some synths, and especially the piano melody that became a crucial part of the song. This was done in between excessive Christmas eating binges, wearing a wifebeater and my trusty long johns, sweating on a couch and doodling on my laptop. How's that for rock glamour?




All in all, there were only probably a few hours spent recording the song. I think we can do it better and faster in the future, especially once we get a better hang of playing live in a studio.




Personally, I'm not looking back. The click track is dead to me now :)




~ Markus

Listened and enjoyed:

- U2 - discography on shuffle

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