So a while ago I was working with a female artists “Katie Wilson” this girl has an amazing voice, think Amy Lee but with a more rounded sound and you would be on the right lines.

Either way she came down from Birmingham for a few days to work with me at Fatnelly’s and we started a project which was never completely finished. It just came about that I was asked to record some female vocals for Kit Rolfe (Belle and the Devotions) who asked to hear some previously recorded material and I came across this project again which really sparked off new ideas. I haven’t actually changed it yet but have a lot of ideas for it so decided it was worth posting.

This was composed by Katie and myself and produced by me. The recording was only to demo quality but still gives a good indication of what a finished product would sound like.

*UPDATE* I have finished the project now so please click HERE to listen.

So on the 10th I was asked by a major label to write a track for a Japanese boy band which has to be submitted this Thursday (12th) tomorrow in fact.

Me (Left) and Jamie (Right) @Fatnelly Recording Studios

Ah… what with recording and producing an album for another artist and working on some side project parts to submit to Universal, this is certainly going to be a tight deadline.

My first concern was that I have been in a “heavy” frame of mind lately recording over-driven guitars and clicky bass drums and this is more a techno, synth stile of writing.

So I sat at my home studio setup messing about with a few ideas I had for a while, mainly banging my head against the desk as it just didn’t sound right… I had idea after idea put just couldn’t piece them together.
The main thing to take into account with this project is the vocal melody and the hooks, they are certainly the most important aspect of the song, so with that in to consideration I used Native’s Massive plug-in to mold a sound to my liking and just got some a basic commercial style chord progression.

An hour had passed and everything was flowing really nicely, I had the vocal melody in mind ready to take to the big studio to record down and the structure was almost finished.

I had decided I wanted to get real drums on it played by my good friend Jamie Parks (an amazing drummer) as I figured this would give a nice contrast and ambiance to the digital sampled drums I have going on. I would also keep my digital samples and mix them in to chop the song up a little and give it that edge.

So today came I wake up at 2PM due to falling asleep at 6AM and get ready to go down the studio, unfortunately the most important thing I had to do I didn’t do…. Tell Jamie he is recording drums for me and arrange a time. After ringing Jamie it turns out that he would be there at 7PM which realistically doesn’t give us a lot of time for setting up drums, miking them up, getting the right sounds and then mixing them as well as recording all the vocals including the 5 way harmonies!

Steven Slate Drums it is then… these are probably the closest you will get to real sounding drums as an instrument plug-in and if im honest they actually sound great in the mix so it’s all going well. I will get the real drums down when I have a free moment after I have sent it to the company just for my own piece of mind.

Hopefully there will be a snippet up of the song by tomorrow.