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EXTRAS
NAT'S STUDIO DIARY
Friday 31 October 2003
Location: Steve Bond's house
Recording: Acoustic Guitar on The Greatest Game, Folded In Half
Lead Vocals on The Greatest Game
It is time for Bekk to shine on day 3 of these recording session. In other words, she has to do a whole lot of work today, while I get to kick back and do pretty much nothing except for a whole lotta sitting around. The whole band is in the studio again, like last Friday.
The first part of today's session goes as follows...
1. listen back to The Greatest Game, as recorded so far
2. listen back to Folded In Half (known today as 'Folded in Arf')
3. tune acoustic guitar
4. Set Bekk up with guitar in one of the bedrooms down the corridor
5. Bekk is ready to record guitar parts for The Greatest Game
6. Steve says "...and we're rolling..."
...unfortunately, Folded In Arf, not The Greatest Game, begins to comes through the studio speakers. Oopsy dear. Nonetheless all is shortly rectified, things are back on track, Bekk tackles her guitar parts for both songs with great skill and passion and in the end walks away victorious.
Onto the first proper singing takes. Before James hits the vocal booth we decide to have a bit of a warm-up by singing 'All The Girls' (a.k.a Marvellous). I notice Steve singing along with the baa-baa's at the end section of the song - this kind of reaction signals to me that The Bank Holidays' masterplan is falling into place.
Once Jim is in vocal booth the rest of the day is devoted to he and Bekk doing their lead vocal parts on The Greatest Game. In preparation for this event, Chates, Jules and I head around to the shop to buy a bottle of whiskey, to um, er, help to loosen the vocal chords (really it's just a great excuse to Chates and Jules to get drunk on the porch while vocal takes are happening). Also around at the shop I get my first encounter with the German hot dog man on the street (as mentioned in last Friday's journal). I think his name is Elmar?
The rest of the day is just spent getting those Greatest Game vocal takes done, so nothing much else really to report. Except for Steve shouting at Chatesy for to go back to the shop and get him a hot-dog (how he made that Hot Dog last for almost 2 hours, I'll never know). And us all listening back to The Greatest Game and agreeing that if this song doesn't set off cash registers around the world and make us a million bucks then something has gone seriously wrong. Seriously.
To round off the day, there was Chatesy's presentation to Steve of the prototypes for "Ventblocker 2120", a product designed to block up wall vents in Steve's house, thus preventing outside noise creeping into the vocal-booth/cloakroom while doing singing takes.
NEXT >> Nat's studio diary - Friday, 7th Nov 2003
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