Week 1 - The Neve.

Week one back at University for Tri 4, and my first project is the Music production on the Neve! Which means some different outboard gear to play with a learn about, and an interesting new Desk to wrap my head around!

Our first assignment my group and i have been tasked with making a sort of remix/mix of an acoustic and vocal stem provided to us. Having a choice between two, both pretty sad slow sounding acoustic songs, we chose the song Distant Friend. Our aim is to make a Post punk version of the song, similar in structure to the current song, but with a bit more punch and grit in the guitar. And a full band setup with bass, drums, guitar and vocals.

Our first lesson was basically getting to know the desk, and room. We spent a bit of time recording scratches and getting the structure down, so that this week coming when we head in to record drums it's all ready to go! It was a good first lesson and i'm looking forward to having a crack at making this sound great.

Over the last year since i've been at SAE, i have been recording my own material, mainly for practice purposes. After showing some of the riffs to friends i used to play in bands with back home, we quickly decided to put together and EP. So a few months ago they flew over and we got set recording most of it in the Large Audient. I've since spent the months between that really practicing on my mixing and trying to get it to a place where i'd be truly happy to release. After many late, soul crushing nights and a lot of studying and advice, as of this weekend we have the finished product! And i'm really quite proud of it, it's been a heap of work and hours but every minute has been excellent and i've learnt an incredible amount in the whole process.

It's a five track EP called Lung Butter By King Cig and the Drag Queens, heavily influenced by the old stoner genres. But sticking to fast rhythm sections and old punk influenced vocals, dropping off into slow heavy distorted grooves. It's been an absolute blast to write, play and record this kind of stuff with my best friends, and i'm super excited to finally drop it in the next couple of weeks. I'll put up one of my favourite tracks on this blog when it's finally released!