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Sugarbeat - Blue Flux 2001  Though now outdated, we've decided to
leave this page on the server, as it might be interesting to those
who'd
like to find out more about the making of our 2002 album 'Sugarbeat'.
A State of Flux Following a move from Britain to Germany in the latter part of 2000, Jill and I had our heads spinning with plenty other things to not think about music for a while. The move was complicated enough, and dismantling our Bigger Hog studio in South Wales was quite a heartbraker.
Our new home is not ideal for setting up
a new studio, so we figured we'd wait until we move to bigger premises.
That belief lasted about 4 weeks, when I picked up a guitar again,
after
completing most of the donkey work of putting up furniture and general
admin aggro. Deprivation had charged my inspirational batteries to
110%,
and as I was playing I realised that I must find a way again to record
what was falling out of my guitar.
The Steely Feel The need for a compromise gave me the idea. Space was the limiting factor - keyboards need lots of it. So I decided to unpack and install only essential recording gear - hard disc recorder, signal processing equipment, and microphones. No sampler, no synths, no sequencer or keyboards. Guitars only - the steely feel! My only concession was to buy an electric
bass guitar, an excellent choice, as it turned out. I hadn't played
bass
before, but it seems to come natural to any guitarist, and it's FUN! I
never could have guessed how much more alive it sounds compared to even
the best bass guitar samples. With relatively little practise all these
bass lines flitting around in my head for years soon became organic
reality. Sugarbeat
The spartanic setup also helps to promote high recording quality, through shorter signal paths, and generally less equipment plugged into the mixer. Although I still master to DAT, post processing on the PC now starts with digital input, and further benefits from some fancy DX plugins for Cool Edit 2000. Recording for the new album Sugarbeat
was completed in October 2001, while post processing and final
mastering
took another 3 weeks. Time well spent - only when all tracks are known
can one begin to tweak and nudge the overall sound to create a
homogenous
sounding album. There really were "no synths used during the making of this
album." I
repeat this claim here as some of the more whacky effects used to
process certain guitar sounds have resulted in timbres that appear
about as non-guitar-like as they come. And yet,Sugarbeat seems to have
a strong feel of consistency by virtue of its instrumental
single-mindedness, effects nonewithstanding. It is, to steal a much
overused term, organic, and to my ears at least a happy ending to a
challenging situation.
Copyright Enthalpy Publishing 2008
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