Day eleven. We had scheduled this thursday to be our last day of recordings, but we were finished yesterday already. So today we spent watching the videos we had shot during the studio. It took over two and a half hours!
Then we celebrated our upcoming record by eating at the legendary Mare Chiaro restaurant. The tuna pizza tasted mega good and my stomach was filled way before I finished.
Now we're home again. It feels good and cosy!
We've been working ten days without any day offs and I can really feel it in my bones. Right after I've finished this post, we'll watch the Twin Peaks movie called Fire walk with me. I hope we'll fall asleep during the credits and wake up cheerful tomorrow!
Everything went really well during the recordings. Maybe some of us cracked a little, but as you know: "no pain, no gain". Haha.
This record is going to be more mysterious and more musical like.
Epic? Maybe. Haunting? Definetly.
We have a magnificent surprise album for you!
We also have loads of footage about the making of it. It'll be probably edited as a 10 minute long short document. Yay!
After the exhausting recordings we start to focus on our upcoming tour in Germany. There's gonna be a good crew and thousands of kilometers.
Before Germany we're gonna play a show in Monsters Of Pop, which is the only gig in Finland for ages. The festival is one of the greatest and the other bands too are sheer brilliantness. So. See you at Tampere, Manchester of Finland, or maybe we'll meet up at somewhere in Germany!
With love,
Dumb
PS. Try to play Bubble Shooter without getting addicted.
11.08.2010
Day number ten, and we're all finished! With yesterday's harp tracks and the incredible amount of vocal harmonies and percussions, we have in our hands IMO the makings of our best album yet! Maybe the crush will wear off in a few days and we start hating the songs again but right at this moment everything sounds so magical. I kinda feel bad for My Loving Martian since he has to go through all the 500 tracks and make them sound good. Not straight away, but in time. AND not that they don't sound perfect and magical already. He hardly has to touch them. Pretty easy actually. Maybe I should do it myself?
After recording all the details, we still had time to listen through all the songs, do some tracks over, listen to them again, clear the space and put everything back to it's proper place, do the dishes, notice that the lights had been left on in Markkumaster Flexmaster Mark 2's car, notice that the car had run out of battery, try to start it with a 12V battery a neighbor had lying around, not get it to do anything, call Dumb's mom, call our friend Late, convince Dumb's mom that she is our last chance and a hero if she comes to save us, wait for her, try to start the car, fail, try, fail, scratch our heads for a while, clean the cables, try again, succeed (!), pack the car, drive around for a while, and now we're safely back at my place in Kallio.
I'm so exited already! It's going to kill me that we have to wait so long for the tracks to get polished. Contentment is a good word to use here.
Good night you golden people, we've done good.
/ Cute
10.08.2010
TODAY we had the first featuring artist ever! A harpist!
What an amazing instrument.
Nevertheless we all started to feel a bit tired.
There's only one and a half days to go. Few guitar band-aids and some backing vocals to go. Some synth and percussion hassle to go.
After that there's some music videos and album covers to go.
Tonight we sat by the Toveri bar with Markkumaster, Martian and Cute playing some Skip-Bo and debating on not only our songs but human life's common cores.
-Dumb
09.08.2010
"Vocals are the strength of this band" -Esa Tontti
08.08.2010
If you listen to our jokes you might notice that it's already our seventh day in a row. The class of our stories has lapsed under the belt a long time ago. There's innuendo everywhere.
Today we made vocals (there's only two more songs to go!) and composed new details.
I'm glad we have had the chance to take it easy with the schedules. We've been having long lunch breaks, because otherwise our brains would probably explode. It's the heat.
Tonight there was a fierce thunder over Helsinki. After we'd admired the lightning through a window we dared to go outside to see the storm better. It was super frightening and thrilling. Maybe the storm will influence the upcoming percussion tracks.
-Dumb
07.08.2010
Sixth day at the studio.
With a slight hang over beating us we (me, Markkumaster and Martian) arrived the studio at 10:30 am. The previous night had gone later as we intended while we were spending our quality time at the Torkkeli park and debating on the new Pintandwefall songs.
After the breakfast we set the studio up usable again. I sang leading vocals to two of our songs with a nice morning croak. Once Cute was there, she built awesome choir to one western song. The ones who doesn't get chills about that particular c-part are crippled.
Today we didn't spend so much time at the studio, because Credit and Springi & Stringi were performing later this evening at Roytorock. The rest of the night we spent at our dear Roytorock festival, meeting old friends and swimming around.
Tomorrow I'll probably have a great stuffy sound in my voice and I'll be able to record the choruses to our upcoming hit single.
-Dumb
06.08.2010
Moi
It was fun this fifth day. We cleaned up the whole Vallila area. Stupid banana flies.
-Cute & Dymb
05.08.2010
The last day in Toijala left us in good ambience. No one has yet bursted into tears, thou we were sure that some of us would do so in the first four days. When we recorded Hong Kong, baby, each of us cracked one at a time. All the time.
Now we have great drum-bass-guitar basis. We spent time twisting the sounds so that the results would sound as ready as possible. The playing felt epic!
This time we managed to make warm and buzzing sounds. There were such references as The Sonics, The Buzzcocks, Ennio Morricone and traditional Hawaiian tunes.
Our record label has to agree with us that this album has to be sold as a vinyl (too).
Even the Casio synth sounds like an old Hammond when it's driven through Orange amplifier, RAT distortion and Artec delay. Oh boy!
Tomorrow we drive to Vallila, Helsinki to continue the sessions.
I'm already pretty excited about the singings!
-Dumb
04.08.2010
Third day at the Bughouse studio. Yesterday Crazy and Tough made a ridicilous short movie. Dumb did a great job shooting it and her boyfriend Markkuflexmastersomething helped out also! Crazy and Tough are gonna show it in Roytorock next saturday when their other band Springi & Stringi is having a gig there.
Today Cute came early and played some basses and glockenspiel. Tough bought a synth from a fleamarket to replace an old broken one. She had already had time to mourn the old Rythmic 10 and now that she find the exact same kind she is superexcited!
Now we are all here at studio and trying to figure some great sounds to Dumb's bass. Right now she's playing a song called "Candy". There's no more drums to play. Dumb bought moustaches for all us four cause we're thinking of doing a music video here at studio!
Music videos are the word of the day, we plan to do a music video of all our songs in the upcoming album!
And cameras! We're all gone bananas about cameras:
Cute shoots action with her Supersampler, Crazy captures wideness with her panoramacamera, Dumb acts like a paparazzi with her macro-objective and Tough harasses everybody with her fish-eye!
Cute eats pomegranate seeds, Dumb eats nachos and salsa and Tough eats sweet cranberries. And Crazy is all crazy with her healthprogram, she eats nothing but some organic flour!
Now Cute is trying to solve a wooden and metallic problem with a string. Our producer My Loving Martian tries to give her advice but she refuses to listen. Otherwise we gladly take advice from him, he has had great ideas with the sounds and everything!
Our sound engineer Pepe Trouble has so far tolerated our stupid jokes, but he's still a little angry at us cause we played arrogantly with his favorite monkeydoll! We call it Pentti but Pepe claims that he is a girl.
-Tough
03.08.2010
Hi!
Tuesday. The day number two.
Today we were very efficient too. At times it thou felt like we were just chewing gum. We recorded the drums to ALL the songs there were left.
There was plenty of time to make a short film for Springi & Stringi. (www.myspace.com/springistringi)
Sweat it was. It wasn't even one of the warmest days? Yay we hard workers!
At the lunch break we visited the Viiala flea market. It was a gigantic treasure chest. Cute found herself a mega cute jacket and made everyone else jealous.
I haven't got time to write any more, because I forgot the power cord to my computer at the studio !!!???!!!
-Dumb
02.08.2010
Hello there friends!
The first day in the sessions of our third album is now over. It was a great success!
In the morning we got a chance to go swimming with Cute and Crazy while Tough was tuning the drums into right positions with our master minded engineers.
Cute had bought a new camera and we took some cool beach pics.
The first four days we're concentrating on the drum lines. This time Dumb (who is I) and Cute are going to play some drums too! It's going to be exciting...
I'm truly enthusiastic about this upcoming album. We already twice decided what was going to be the name of the album. Maybe the latter will be it.
Today we played drums for four or five songs. We're keeping things simple and we're never laggards in the studio.
Nevertheless making album is always about waiting and it can be pretty boring. Usually we turn the waiting into stupid jokes and wild ideas.
Actually it's kinda fun!
We're doing the drums in the very same and sympathetic Bughouse studios in Toijala where we made the first two albums as well. The same sofas and faces. It's a great privilege to work with the people you really like and appreciate.
Tomorrow we start at ten am.
-Dumb