Amber States / Musicians / Blog / Urchin Studios

Blog

Amber States

September 16, 2011

Please note: The following content may not be entirely balanced and the facts contained may have been correlated without any proper research to suit the bias of it’s author.

As anyone who’s visited Urchin Studios will testify, it is probably pound for pound the greatest recording facility ever conceived by any person ever. Within its walls no solo is too virtuosic, no ensemble performance too precognitive, no sonic achievement too technical. Dan has even occasionally been seen levitating in the control room during a particularly heady mix.

But some things are even out of Urchin’s lofty grasp, especially when you need to record a quiet cello, a grand piano and a loud drummer at the same time. That’s why Team Urchin headed for Strongroom for the tracking stage of Amber States’ second EP.

If you haven’t checked out Amber States before you really should as they are excellent indeed. Their lead singer Gavin Bell and I met last year in the early hours of an audaciously boozy gathering. He said “I’m in a band”, I said “I’ve got a studio” and after both agreeing that we were “best mates” said we should work together on some “shit” in the future. Funny thing is we actually did and about two weeks later me and The Cox recorded their first EP.

For their second, they wished to track the whole thing (vocal and all) live with no click: proper Old Skool. So we decamped to Strongroom in Shoreditch for the day to do the tracking. Although it is no Urchin, Strongroom does boast a bigger live room, two booths and Neve console which all came in pretty useful for task in-hand. So we stuck the drums in booth 1, vocals and acoustic axe in booth 2 with the rest of the lads (banjo sometimes guitar, piano sometimes organ and cello) in the live room. To get a bit of Urchin magic into the recording we brought with us the Hayman drums a selection of mics and for vibe, a small plastic panda.

While we set up, to keep themselves occupied the boys did some inventive things with nuts, including these ‘cashew fangs’.

Just a tiny example of some of the laughs that were had

Once set-up was complete the boys performed the songs, with no messing about too. We recorded 4, most of them in the first two takes. Right, easy. Then back to Urchin armed only with the task of making them sound good. Which we did.

If you like vintage microphones or subscribe to Tape-Op/live alone, the following photographs might just be of interest.

Hayman with Fet 47 on the toms. Because we can.