From building a studio up a mountain, to recording a string quartet in a church, Simon Munro from Alex Bell describes the recording adventures of their ‘Petals’ EP.
Getting away from home to record music on location is an alluring idea, promising greater freedom, and the energy of the open country. More often than not, though, the idea soon dissipates in the practical realities of a recording project. For us, the fantasy studio took the form of a little house with church-like ceilings on a three acre mountain patch.
A little family property on Mt Mee was not only where most of the songs were written, we’d also demoed them there over one winter weekend. After finding engineers crazy enough to make the trip (Andrei Maberley and Joss Rigby), we decided to take the plunge, armed with a collection of five love songs, bookended by a song about past and a song about the sea.
The first days were spent building, with the veranda becoming a makeshift workstation for construction and soldering. (For me, it was mostly spent making tea and tuning an autoharp.) The second bedroom, which conveniently had line of sight to the main room across a little garden, was soundproofed and decked out with hardware. The main room was then wired up as a live room, the third bedroom as a guitar overdub room, part of the verandah as a vocal booth, and even the back shed chipped in as a scratch guitar room.
We dedicated the first two days of recording to performing live takes, completely isolating the instruments to allow complete flexibility for overdubs. The rest of our time — around 10 days — we spent tracking guitar, bass, percussion and other overdubs. It’s fair to say we struggled with the question of where to draw the line between live takes and overdubs (not an uncommon dilemma). While we wanted the songs to feel as natural as possible (by throwing out click tracks, for example), we wanted to devote the time to give each instrument its own character in the mix.
After relocating back to Brisbane for the final band overdubs, we were left with one last recording session to capture the string parts (beautifully arranged by a good friend, Eleanor Angel). I desperately wanted to record them in a church, but due to our lack of public liability insurance, this proved incredibly difficult. After almost trashing the idea entirely, we landed upon an incredible space, St Augustine’s in Hamilton. I don’t think the string parts were tweaked once in the mixing process; they came out with an epic natural reverb that blended well with the sound of the Mt Mee house.
The process of building a studio from scratch was incredibly difficult logistically — and inevitably led to some compromises — but it also gave us an incredible amount of freedom. And not just musically; we moved as we pleased, and in the mountain air it was easy to recharge. The cars and the cows might have ruined the odd take, but if you listen closely, you’ll know we never questioned the bird songs.
