Dear beautiful people,
A few reviews of our most recent album have been popping up since it’s official in-store release a few weeks ago – Leave a kind word to the pieps for their effort – I’ll try posting more when more reviews pop up on the radar:
Dutch: http://www.kwadratuur.be/releases.php?id=4889
Meanwhile we’re busy booking/looking for shows, we’ll start doing shows in support of Sins And Sounds as of next month, and some sweet stuff coming up for the beginning of next year… keep you posted!
For now we have a nice and intimate acoustic-chistmas-y-thing scheduled @ JHDechoke on the 20th of December (. So if you’re afraid santa-claus won’t bring you anything….come get it yourself!
Cheers for now… and talk to you soon!
I think an amazingly huge thank you is appropriate to all who contributed to making our release of last Saturday such an amazing evening. All the people of the Choke (the venue) who we can always count on to help, Bob and Joste for doing an amazing, A-MA-ZING job for the sound, Moens for taking care of the lights (and there were a lot!), all the bands who layed down amazing performances, Ed for being the camera-man and guitar-tech and last but not least everybody who showed up and supported us! (we’ve never sold so many albums on a release, muchos kuddos!)
We’ll soon try to upload some pics, vids, etc. on here, or maybe on a different blog/forum. Not sure what will happen to this blog for the moment, maybe we’ll keep it for random rants, news, show-updates, show-reports, gear-talk, blabla. … time will tell. Let us know what you would like to see (!!!)
so, where were we. We’ve uploaded the .wav files so they could be downloaded by the nice folks at Westwest side studio’s for mastering. I’m always a bit weary to be doing this via the net. Yes a .wav is uncompressed and should come out the other side exactly the same…but still… guess i’m a little too old-school for modern times…especially when everything you did for the past 3 months is concentrated in an x Mb file…
Alan Douches made a first mastering and uploaded some samples, we downloaded them, listened and sent our comments. To be sure we sent them to Jimmy as well, who by this time was touring Portugal with Homer. Thing is that Alan is such a pro that it’s not easy to give ‘feedback’ to somebody of that caliber. Off course it sounded awesome, better than the un-mastered mix, louder, more in your face, … nonetheless we did some back and forth mailing with small remarks and suggestions. On the previous cd we did not have the opportunity to monitor the mastering this closely so this was a really nice experience.
Meanwhile we were also finishing the artwork. Peter worked closely with Bart Schoofs, the well known cartoonist from the Leuven Area. He really has his own style and own thing going, which is something we were in no doubt looking for. Strange thing is Bart did not hear a note of music while making the artwork. Based on the lyrics i sent him, he let the creativity flow and it turned out AWE-SOME. I must admit i was a bit skeptical at first, punk-rock and cartoons, euh, huh… but once i saw the first draft versions i was 110% sold! (you can check out a sample on our myspace or on the promo-posters).
Meanwhile Westwest side send the master back by overnight delivery, we sent it to the production company together with the artwork and yesterday the finished albums landed on our doorstep! 2 days ahead of time, as the release is tomorrow, s-w-e-e-t! Hope to see you all there …
All basic tracks done, all additional tracks done and 4 days of mixing ahead, Yihaah! We decided to do the mixing in Déstudio because we had such a great experience there recording our previous album. And to be honest, there’s this sweet and expensive mixing board that just sounds incredible…
Started the day loading all the tracks into pro-tools and making up a basic sound for the drums. It was great hearing the tracks again on these awesome studio-monitors after a month of i-pod playing: ear buds SUCK. Anyway, as everything was recorded and stored ‘dry’ we started with basic things like some compressing and EQ’in the drums and bass and finding a nice mix of the 2 bass channels and the 2 guitar-tracks for each guitar. Also had a nice challenge mixing vocals because there are quite a lot of tracks…
Mixing is tricky, and your ears can really play tricks on you, so we tried taking breaks as often as needed and not to overdo it the first days. “What’s that sound there… ” ” Do you here a whisper there?” ” Sounds like a dog barking…” and more non-sense… We kept the two ‘biggest’ tracks for our last days, filling up the entire 32 track mixing board… nice In the end it went quite smooth with a much appreciated helping hand from Dirk, the owner/producer/engineer/hero from Déstudio.
THIS SUCKER IS READY for mastering, which will be done by Adam Douches @ Westwest side studio’s in New York. He’s this awesome pro who worked with numerous “big” bands so obviously we were/are very happy with his work on our previous album -
- If all goes well Sins And Sounds should be finished before our release on 11October 2008 !!! !!! !!! -
We’ve always had unconventional instruments/guests on sixtoys’ albums. On copy paste & repeat we did a song with a Bass-tuba. On Forbidden War we had the ‘child-choir’ in the song Heroes…
.. This time we had been thinking about incorporating a marimba-like line in a song called ‘Chains On Me’. Our friend Pieter V. stepped up to the plate. He’s this amazing marimba – vibraphone – drummer – anything-percussion-musician. We ended up using the Vibraphone on 2 songs and some additional percussion as well. We used kettledrums on one of the songs and a what must have been 60″ (1,5m) bass drum which produced this really cool drone-sound. Sunn((((o)))) watch your back…
We had also worked together with an old school-buddy of Peter called Stijn who is this amazing jazzy-violin player. We were working on an idea for the ending of the album. It’s this huge arrangement with a lot of additional stuff and thought a violin would really contribute to the feeling we were going for with this. We went to sugarbeatstudios www.sugarbeat.be, and stijn laid down this amazing Baltic-like-line which was exactly what we were looking for… great job! Also, Anton Walgrave, the owner of the studio, came by to sprinkle some of his amazing voice on the track. “One man Kozak-choir”. It’s really intimidating but inspiring to be working with such talented musicians … if i’ll ever be half the musician each of these guys are i’ll die a happy man.
By now this baby is ready for mixing! More on the mixing and the artwork soon! Nice to see so many of you are reading this stuff, hope you enjoy…
The last day we recorded additional vocals together with Bob and Berger until about 5 am. and went to bed at about 6.30 in the morning. Woke up and cleaned up while Jimmy made a rough listening-mix. We’ll do the mixing somewhere during the first weeks of September @ Déstudio, so there was still a good month of listening ahead of us. Listening and additional recording…
Being totally separated from anything remotely close to day-to-day-real-life… How did i ever wake up and not think about music. Strange feelings that this is over already and we’ll all go back to reality. On one hand it’s really nice to come back home, an album behind our belt-buckle and ready to take this thing on the road. On the other hand, this is all i really want to do for the rest of my life, not worry about payment deadlines, dirty cars, family obligations, the length of the grass, … just make music, learn, play…
PS. By now the release is coming really close. Check www.myspace.com/sixtoys for a new song and a sneak-peek at the new artwork. Check it out, leave a comment…
Some pics of finishing-up the vocal and guitar tracks on day 10 – 11. Our good friends B&B came along to help us do some gang-vocals and make some awesome chinese food … thanks again for taking such good care of us and teaming-up with the Sixtoys-choir!!!
enjoy!
Ps. We should be uploading a song sometime this week so keep an eye and an ear open!
After all the gibberish on guitars, time for some singing! As said before, we’re combining recording guitar and singing to relieve a bit of the stress on the ones doing the singing. The ones doing the singing being three of us. It’s at times ,i believe, quite confusing for our producer Jimmy because we switch quite often from lead to back-up, to backing, to choir, to chant, to scream, it’s not easy keeping all the pro-tool-files in order…
But first things first, because there are about 6 or 7 possible ‘recording-booths’ in this studio, we started by running around the place, checking the specific acoustics and tone of each room, adding some damping material here and there, and finally coming to the conclusion that our first idea, to record the vocals from the guitar-booth, was the best one… time well spent!
Next step is trying out quite a lot of different mics and pre-amps. Sennheiser MD 421, 2 different MD 21’s, your obligatory SM 57 and 58 and some other stuff. Jimmy and myself did the blind test, recorded a song with each mic and pre-amp combination and chose our favorite (without me knowing which was which) and remarkably chose exactly the same combination. Off-course this is a choice you partly have to make with your gut because it might as well just been the best vocal-take…
Next is applying some compression and echo/delay to the vocals to have a better idea of what the vocals are going to sound like in the final mix. Purists may say ‘it’s not real if you add digital or even spring reverb to a vocal afterwards’ – but the fact of the matter is that in real life, not one sound you hear, be it car horns, sirens, dog’s barking, the neighborgs wife singing the sound of music, is ever really ‘dry’. The sounds bounce off of buildings, cars, walls, streets and some purists big forehead.. so in order to keep options open and record the vocals as well as possible ,we took the above approach.
By the time we finally had the right configuration set up in the right room and had everything up and running there was only time left to do 2 lead vocal lines. Still a lot of work to do, both guitar-wise and singing-wise, so i guess to main spotlight is on Jonas and myself for the moment…
The Gibson Custom i used to record the majority of my guitar-parts on this album is quite an old guitar. In fact, it’s built in 1972 (according to the folks at Gibson-Europe). This would make it a good decade older than me. It’s kind of absurd to me, that long before i was even born, this guitar was already around, making music … so i thought it would be interesting to trace the roots of this guitar back and find out a little bit about it’s history.
After some mailing and phoning previous owners i found out that this guitar was originally built in the Kalamazoo or Nashville Gibson plant, shipped to the United Kingdom and bought during the early seventies in ‘The Guitarist Shop’ in Rochdale – UK, a shop that is said to have gone out of business during the eighties… The Guy who bought it used to play in several semi-professional pub-bands playing around the island. He kept the guitar for several years and for some unknown reason sold it to a local collector (I’m still trying to find out why) who bought the guitar for it’s age and because it was/is a « classic » to own. After this it was not used for gigging anymore and spent a good amount of time under a bed. Several years later it made it’s move to Belgium and via a number of hands ended up in my lap and it has been my main recording and live-guitar ever since…
I really am delighted to find out more about this piece of wood (i actually have the contact details of all previous owners) and although it may not mean a lot in the big sheme of things, it means the world to me …
