Last week we finally got around to record the second round of the pre-prod recordings. We had the privilege to visit our gig buddies’ Röökipaikka’s rehearsal space for the recordings and the nicest man alive, Mr Kari Degerman, took care of the engineering work. 12 songs recorded in two nights. Some of them in one take, some two, and a few required more than that. We only did the basic backing tracks, drums-bass-guitars, and mixed live on stereo tracks. This week I will add the vocals and that’s pretty much it. The solos were also part of the live recording. We’re not doing multi-track layers, effects or anything like that in this round.

It’s clear that this is a super useful exercise to do. The acoustics in our own practice place are not ideal so now we get to hear things properly. We have a month and a half until the studio and some of the stuff needs to be tightened up and some of it loosened up. I am finding that probably more of my notes are about playing less – especially on guitars it’s about reducing some of the picking hand movement. I personally also have a bit of Hetfieldesque downpicking practice to do to tighten up my rhythm guitar. At least for guitars, ‘Bad Time’ is the hardest song to get perfect or close enough. It has a long instrumental ending with all kinds of guitar fuckery and it’ll probably require a few takes at the studio before we’re happy.

I’ve also made progress on the lyrics side of things, with one song completely re-written. It will be interesting to see what it sounds like with all new lyrics. At least now the words make sense and tell a story. I think it will be called ‘Shine’, but we’ll see…

Last week’s highlight was obviously Finland men’s football team qualifying for the Euro championships for the first time ever (no world cup attendance either). Fuckin ‘ hell… who would have thought. Finland’s men’s team making it in football and Flush being serious about making an album. Wait, I think I see a pig flying outside!

Catch you laterz, flushers!

Lasse / Flush