I woke up at 9am, feeling fresh (ish, not a morning person), had a bowl of fruit and fibre and a cuppa, and headed over to the Heroic Audio headquarters. Heroic Audio is an audio production and recording company ran by a very good friend of mine, Ben Gaines. An aural wizard, idea generator, ginger viking and also the brother of my drummer, Sam. He recorded our album (did I mention we're releasing an album that's OUT NEXT FRIDAY ON SEPTEMBER 1ST), gave us a TON of good advice throughout the recording process and made it sound better than we could have ever imagined. We frustrated him so much throughout the process by being difficult and picky and very hard to work with at times, and he has openly admitted he hates us on numerous occasions, but he is still willing to work with us which is good of him. I mean he loves us really, if he really hated us we'd all be chopped up and thrown in bins across Derby right now. Anyway, I digress. I went to visit Ben to create a bunch of interludes to integrate into our live set. And for good reason.
Every time I go to watch a band, I'd say 8 or 9 times out of 10 that band has a backing track of some form leading in or out of songs. Often both. This is generally done in a couple of ways. The band, or at very least the drummer, will be playing along to click track that will be triggered at the very beginning of their set. A backing track will be running in the background, and the band follow the click track to make sure what they're playing is completely in time with the backing, which sounds SUPER tight. Or, one of the band will trigger pre made intros and outros as a way of leading us in and out of songs, which if done right and crafted properly, sounds so slick and polished. The latter is what we'll be doing. We currently don't do this. We used to, and our set was so so polished, and we used to get complimented on our professionalism so often. Now, I'm not saying we don't now, as we still get good feedback and comments on our shows, but I think if we re-introduced this element, we could really become a force to be reckoned with. So there I was. Re-introducing.
We've been playing the same set for the last couple of years, with the addition of one or two songs here and there. It is time for change. Not just to make things more exciting for the people watching us, but to breathe a bit of life back into the set for us. So we started. The song we started the set with is no longer in the set at all. I wanted to completely changed everything. I do not want to spoil it, but our set is starting with something really cool. It has impact, it's memorable, and most importantly, it's nostalgic. I won't say any more about it. You just gotta trust me it's cool. Then the fun started. A few of the intros required a small amount of composing to be done. Tiny compositions to lead us into songs in the set. Ben has more sounds in his recording software than you've probably come across in life, and knows the library like the back of his hand. We spent hours writing, crafting, scrapping, reshuffling, adding, taking away, drinking tea, talking about Game Of Thrones and telling him to shut up because I haven't seen the newest episode yet, more writing and crafting. And at the end of the day, we had everything we needed for a new set. Everything I had envisioned for our set to make it more professional. We nailed it out in about 8 hours. Perfect timing too, as we had a band practice almost straight after, so I had my opportunity to pitch the new set and the interludes to the rest of the band.
I had no idea if they'd like the changes or not. We are all very different people and in turn that makes us all individually very difficult to predict and read. Legit they might have said "Yo Dave are you high, this set is awful and those interludes sound like an aural version of a dirty nappy". But luckily for me, everybody was on board. Completely on board. We played through the set with the interludes, and it felt like it flowed better than what we'd been playing until now. I think we all agreed, we were all on the same page. Mission accomplished. Now, to test it out at a show.
We'll be debuting our new set at Macmillan Festival in Nottingham on September 2nd. A great day of music for an even greater cause. There's so many good acts playing all day, so much variety. We've been a part of this festival in the past, and regardless of whether we've been on the bill or not, we've always been in attendance. This will double up as our album release show, so it's gonna be a good one. Come and party with us. To grab a ticket, click here.
See you in the pit. Well, I won't I'll be on stage, but I'll be able to see you in the pit.
Actually, thinking about it, I won't be wearing my glasses on stage, so I probably won't know if you're in the pit at all. I might not even know you're there.
See you at some point during the festival.
Thank you for reading. I'm gonna go and listen to the new Neck Deep album and do adult things like washing and cleaning.
D.S
x
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