Sorry folks, couldn’t get a song out this week. A combination of a lack of anything remotely decent coming out of my brain/fingers and work/personal-related stuff continually getting in the way put paid to any chance of me getting anything that wasn’t utter shite out there.
However, the objective remains the same – 52 songs in 52 weeks, and I’ll do some catching up on my two weeks off work at the start of March.
In the meantime, you can download an album I co-produced and co-engineered back in 2006 (95MB .zip file). The album is by a band called The Mocha Nights, who are, for all intents and purposes, no more.
My mate James did a new mix on the album to make it sound ‘massive and modern’. While it’s not the way I would’ve mixed it (and hopefully will mix it one day…I still have all the master multitracks on my hard drive….) it sounds great and I’m glad that the songs are out there again. This band should’ve been massive, but things didn’t go the way they perhaps should’ve.
This entry was written by , posted on January 30, 2011 at 7:34 pm, filed under 52 weeks of music, life, music, recording and tagged 52 weeks of music, music, recording, the mocha nights. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Yeah, that band who I’ve been working with on and off since November – the album’s finally in the can and you can hear some tracks at www.myspace.com/themochanights.
Right now there’s Midnight Sleepers (upbeat guitar pop with a cheesy keychange at the end), Chasing Angels (very Queen-ish, big lush ballady thing), Theif of Hearts (no, not a cover of the unreleased Bon Jovi song of the same name, kinda like a cross between ‘Same old Song & Dance’ by Aerosmith and Andrew Lloyd Webber) and The Dinner Party (Like Muse meets The Beatles, all on crack. Or something).
Anyway, enjoy. James Mackenzie (of www.rupturedrecordings.com) did a great job on the mix & master.
This entry was written by , posted on September 15, 2006 at 2:34 pm, filed under music, recording and tagged music, recording, the mocha nights. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
…The recording of The Mocha Nights‘ full length album, that is, with me as co-producer/co-engineer (the band will no doubt be doing ‘producery’ things, being the perfectionists that they are, and James Mackenzie, my old Reverend Neil McDougall bandmate and current Tempercalm main man will be aiding the engineering side of things).
We’re doing the recording at Jonny the bass player’s house for the next month while his folks are off holidaying in Hong Kong and other exotic locales. If it’s not finished by that point (likely), then we’ll probably use the drummer’s rehersal garage, folks’ bedrooms or The Shire (the house in the middle of nowhere that Bush (guitar/vocals) stays in, where we recorded the debut EP in January) to do the rest. My main hope is that we can get all the drum tracks done by the end of the month, as theoretically guitars, keys, bass and vocals could be done damn near anywhere, really, with today’s technology.
I know there’s a bunch of tech geeks/GAS hounds reading this, so here’s a breakdown of some of the gear we’ll be using…
Mackie VLZ 1642 16-channel mixing desk (A temporary fix until Mackie get their fingers out and send the VLZ1604 the guys ordered to Sound Control, should do the job in the mean time though)
PC with M-Audio Delta 1010 sound card (external rack-mountable audio interface with 8 analogue and two digital inputs. Mmmm.)
Behringer rack gear (Composer Pro compressor, 4-channel noise gate, headphone amp/distribution/monitoring unit type thingy)
Mixture of Sennheiser, Shure, Audio-Technica and AKG microphones
Mesa Engineering Single Rectifier and Rect-o-Verb heads (and accompanying closed-back 2×12 cabs)
Peavey bass amp with 4×10 and 1×15 cabs
Gretsch Drum Kit (with various cymbals, Iron Cobra double kick pedal and various other bing-bongs)
Epiphone Les Paul(s), Fender Telecaster(s), Godin SD (mine :P), Music Man bass, some sort of Fretless Bass
Roland RD-700 Stage Piano
Big-ass house in Bridge of Weir 😉
Should be fun. Hopefully I can do a Hitchcock and sneak a musical cameo on there somewhere. 😛
This entry was written by , posted on November 1, 2005 at 10:35 pm, filed under music, recording and tagged music, recording, sonar, the mocha nights. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
A couple of weeks ago, I went off to a farm in the middle of the windswept Glennifer Braes, a big-ass area of farms, hills and other such green-ness in the west of Scotland, south of Glasgow. As the topic title suggests, I was there to produce the debut EP of a band I’m friends with, The Mocha Nights. Last night the mixing & (rudimentary) mastering was done and I gave the dudes their master copies to burn off and send to promoters and stuff.
Additionally, I just uploaded the whole thing to their webspace (with their blessing, natch) and now I’m posting the links here to let my LiveJournal friends get in on the action early (the MP3s won’t be linked to on the site until after they’re out gigging).
So, here we go…right click on each track name and save to yer hard drives.
1 – Midnight Sleepers
The guys were shooting for a funky sort of Dave Matthews-ish sound to this one. Definitely very sunny and upbeat, and a cool opener.
2 – View From The Eyes
More sombre this one, a piano driven melancholy ballad with a big RAWK chorus.
3 – Love In Orbit
A bit Police-meets-modern-rock this one, about interstellar hanky-panky.
4 – Dinner Party
The ‘epic’, so to speak – five and a half minutes in three sections. Good one to close things with, and very Muse-esque in places, with touches of The Beatles. Listen for the nugget right at the end of the MP3.
Enjoy, and constructive feedback on the songs and the recordings are greatly appreciated, seeing as we should be doing the next EP some time in the summer. 😀
This entry was written by , posted on February 11, 2005 at 8:20 am, filed under music, recording and tagged music, recording, the mocha nights. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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