Recording in the Summer - Day 2

Photo: Ed Townend // ELT Music

…written about 6 months later. oops.

(If you missed the first instalment, you can catch it on my blog)

I can’t lie, this last half a year has been intense for some reasons I shan’t be going into detail with, but a big one is that at this moment I’m sat amongst half-unpacked cardboard boxes and gazing longingly at my piano that lacks a seat… it’s become a temporary solution for a lack of desk chair in the other room, whilst we move items like Tetris around a new flat, eventually trying to find them permanent homes.

I also have a tendency to hibernate slightly over the winter months, I’m sure many of us feel the same. However, with the sun slowly gaining familiarity with the British public, and the daffodils, the blossom and the narcissi raising their sleepy heads, I feel okay enough to start reminiscing on last summer again, knowing that this year’s sunshine is just around the corner. (If not peeking its way through the clouds already…)

So without further ado…

day two at studiOwz in beautiful pembrokeshire.

You last left me after day one, having gained a footing and familiarity with being a ‘producer in a real-life studio’ and marvelling at the beauty of the Welsh countryside. We tracked drums and double bass together, we used jumpers to solve mysteries and we explored interesting microphones that I’d never seen before. (If you missed it on my mailout, you can read the first diary entry on my blog.)

On day two, we brought in The Warden for guitar tracking, after a morning where I got to play a grand piano again, which made me feel like I was coming home.

More on that later…

As with Rich & Zach, I’ve had the pleasure of working with Steve on other music projects alongside this one, notably with Small Miracles. I spent some time in 2024 creating interesting sound design/synth layers and singing some dramatic backing vocals for a couple of songs on their debut album ‘A Human Connection’ released last November. You can have a listen to my ‘melancholy whale’ as it came to be known, alongside my la-dee-dahs on Love In Retrograde and Make it Make Sense. 

It’s always such a pleasure to work and create new music with the lovely folk in Small Miracles. I’ve since nicked a couple of them for my live performances too (as they have, me).

Anyway, back to the studio…

Steve and I had met prior to the studio visit to work through two of the tracks. Previously, having needed to practise them for live performances, he had told me that I’d written the guitar parts in an unusual way. The fret placements I had come up with were not the go-to of a typical guitarist writing music… but this was not necessarily a bad thing. Having played the piano since I was little it has always been my default for composing everything (even though it’s not my primary instrument) so the guitar lines I had written are based around the octave that the hand naturally falls to when playing the piano. 

In fact, the guitar line for one of the songs is based on a little loop that I re-discovered on my electric piano from 2017. The temporary name of which was  ‘The Thing in My E-Piano’. T e r r i b l e name - however, not as bad as the temporary name for ‘Over It’...

Photo: Ed Townend // ELT Music

Steve and I talked about how it was actually a pretty great way to change up your composing as a songwriter. Switch instruments or try to write for a different one altogether using what you know. See which interesting patterns and chords, sequences or melodies materialises through your creativity. See where it takes you.

I like letting the instrumentalists I work with occasionally be freer in their performance during recording. It’s a completely different process to my traditional classical composition training, where - unless specifically dictated - the instructions and notation need to be clear and specific, even down to the literally the ebbs and flows loudness at any given point. (Unless we’re talking about avant-garde ‘text scoring’, where interpretation is totally down to the performer, within the ‘rules’ of the piece outlined by the composer).

In the studio, we can just play around and see what feels right.

Photo: Ed Townend // ELT Music

I always have a basis, I write the score or tabs as the baseline, but where some things are just not usual for an instrument (or if it’s literally impossible to play, and it needs adjusting), we can see what feels better in the moment.

It allows for much more expression and the performer is able to bounce new ideas off the previously recorded instruments within the song, maybe even adjusting the melody or rhythm at times. 

The third song we recorded in the studio - ‘Control’ - was ~all vibes only~ when it came to guitar tracking. It started with the framework of the song, the piano, the double bass, the drums and some spooky sound design I’d created with the demo vocals, and then we experimented with the guitar exploring the ‘empty’ spaces in between.

I now feel like it’s added this gorgeous, haunting and tension building layer to the song. It’s an interesting mix between Massive Attack, Radiohead and Civil Twilight. ‘Control’ is the most vulnerable and internalised out of all three songs recorded in the studio, it digs right into the roots of mental health into the depths of the psyche and the vertigo swirling of the inner mind and ego.

Since recording it, I’ve been able to play around with the editing of the guitar in the mix, bringing it into the right moments, rather than leaving it to be a wash of sound behind everything else. I think the guitar has now really elevated the whole song. Magic.

Speaking of magic - I don’t think I’d even mentioned The Big Trees last time.

Photo: Ed Townend // ELT Music

The Big Trees were indeed magic. The crunchy gravelly joy of this valved, pre-amp that was perfect for grunging up the drums and electric guitar. Since these tracks are slightly (or not so slightly) infused with the trip-hop persuasion, it really needed that analogue crunch. It was also a lot of fun to explore just how crunchy it could get. Owain recorded each of these as a separate stereo track through The Big Trees so I could mix them in as much as I liked, and so the final mixes now have this subtle crunch, making them a little crispy if you will - and I like it very much.

The box looks very cool as well, it has four stacked wiggley plates holding the valves - red, orange, light orange and yellow - almost like an abstract troop of mushrooms. My favourite part of the design is the ‘root’,‘branch’ and ‘dirt’ descriptors for changing the bass, treble and gain. I’d have loved to play a bit more with this if I had more time (maybe in the future…?)

Steve played the electric guitar in the control room, directly feeding tracks via the Big Trees and a Watkins Copi Cat Tape Echo. We also had an amplifier mic-ed up in the main hall of the church, making use of the loudness and the dramatic reverb that the room generates. This combination was perfect for the ambience and the wash of grunge that were necessary in a couple of moments in the EP. The acoustic we had Steve play in the hall itself, bringing out the washy reverb and perfect for the delicate folk-like under-layers of the other two songs.

Circling back a little bit to the beginning of the day…

I’ve had the luck of playing grand pianos in beautiful spaces only a handful of times in my life. The earliest memory of doing this was an Eisteddfod in Devizes, where the concept was completely nicked from Yr Cymry - tut). Another at Midsomerset Festival in Bath when I was still in single digits, later followed by the middle-formative years as a teen, playing the piano in the school’s music hall (which came after practising on honky-tonk upright pianos in paper-thin walled practice rooms above the laundry of the school before the music building came into being.

Most recently I played the grand piano at music school, accompanying other instrumentalists for their performance opportunities, or s t r u g g l i n g my way through Mark Anthony-Turnage’s ‘No Let Up’(named extremely appropriately) for the Contemporary Music Group. 

Ultimately my favourite memory of playing a grand piano is practising Chopin’s ‘Nocturne in Eb’ at 7:45am before school started, in that music hall as a teenager. The morning sun easing its way through the glass windows and the rest of the building totally empty. It was a place of solace and escape during a pretty fraught time, and it’s become a bit of a core memory for me.

A new beautiful memory forms on this day by playing this grand piano - a Bechstein Model C Semi Concert Grand Piano - at 8:30am before the recording day started, alone in this gorgeous converted chapel-turned-music-studio. I warmed up with that same Chopin piece. (The pieces of music that you carry with you through life? That’s one of them for me). The yellow, hazy morning summer light melts through the long narrow windows up above and cascades onto the keys and the strings. The warmth of the piano fills the room and only a buzz of the crickets in the nearby fields can be heard delicately behind it. 

I have a Yamaha weighted electric piano at home that I practise on, that has lasted since I was 11 years old (I know - planned obsolescence? Never even heard of her), but it’s never the same. And how could it be? I would replace it with an upright acoustic if I could, but trying to navigate it through a narrow apartment corridor into the living room is not the one! So this was pretty special.

It always is for me, playing a grand piano.

We recorded the piano for all three songs in the morning, with microphones at different distances so that I could later layer them together to capture the timbre of the instrument and the reverb of the space. There are, of course, some fantastic VST (Virtual Studio Technology) recreations of pianos but nothing comes close to capturing that organic, incidental sigh of the sustain pedals, a creak of the piano stool, or the expression that is imbued from a fundamental connection with the performance space around you.

The piano has been central to all of my songs so far, whether a Massive Attack inspired descending octave line punctuation or a Tori Amos-esque keyboard dancing composition. It’s where I start my pieces and songs - in the witching hour when inspiration strikes - and it’s where they ‘end’, when they’re performed live or in the studio.

I don’t know if that will always be the case, I’ve started thinking more about other ways of starting a song and I’ve had some inklings of ideas using a bit more technology & hardware… we’ll just have to see what happens next.

And speaking of ‘next’, stick around for the third and final day diary entry coming soon: day three, strings and voice. (And you won’t have to wait 6 months for that one, promise)

Freyja x