The Birth of Stalisfield Day 3

After yesterdays triumphant recording debut the talented twosome attacked todays's recording sessions with a renewed vigour! The successful recording of You Sleep With Your Eyes Open - complete with strings! - had filled the mighty Balustrade with confidence and the sky is indeed the limit!

To fill the casual observers in how we are doing this here is a breakdown of the kit we are using to record Stalisfield;

The heart of the recording system in Lex's eMac which is running Apple's GarageBand software. A stunning piece of software that costs less than £40 it offers multi-track recording, utliizing both real instruments, vocals and digital/software inputted instuments. It can do almost anything you can imagine, from drums and percussion, through strings piano and all sorts of wierd synthy sounds that could make the mighty Balustrade turn into Emerson Lake and Palmer at the click of a mouse button! It also offers up loads of cool amp sounds for your guitar and vocal effects to cover up the out of tune wharblings that may or may not have been a feature of todays recording!

Connecting the outside world to the Mac is a Tascam US-122 USB Audio/MIDI interface which is the Rosetta stone of the Stallisfield experience. Connecting guitars and mics and transferring the analog signals into digital, it was this magic box of tricks that solved all our problems on Day 2! An impressive piece of kit, that's not cheap. Good job it's ace!

Rounding off the studio set-up are the instruments. Cart's electric acoustic, Lex's 12 string and Epiphone SG electric as well as the brand new Evolution 25 note MIDI keyboard. Thus far most of the guitar parts have been recorded on Carts's acoustic, plugged straight into magic box, but today we beefed up a couple of guitar parts using the electric and an assortment of GarageBand's Marshall-based pre-amp sounds. The keyboard is a god send though and is allowing us to program in drum lines, bass lines and strings - eat your heart out Mick Skinner, us west country white boys can program drum loops to!!

And that is it it for day 3. We recorded El Mariachi (my little guitarista) and El Cartino's Blues #4 today, which means we only have 3 songs to go before a rough version of Stalisfield is complete. So far it seems to be going well!

Todays recording was brought to you by tea, cheese and ham toasties, Cadbury's Twirls, the Kings of Convenience and the over excited shouting and arsing about of 2 single blokes on a week off in an empty house.