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| Racket Club Studio Update : Early Songs Emerging |
| Pete here, and I thought you might like some insight into what we get up to when we lock ourselves away and tell everyone we are writing. |
| Well, with some albums like .COM, we start by working on strong ideas that for whatever reason didn't end up being used on a previous release. This breaks the ice and we find that once we've got some ideas working, it gets easier to carry on. |
| With this album we are working on now, we decided that we would start from scratch and see what music we came up with. To do this we spend weeks jamming together in the Racket Club and record everything to MiniDisk. Every so often we will listen through to our 'organised chaos,' catalogue our ideas, and transfer the things that excite us on to a compilation tape. To give you an idea of how long a process this is we probably record two to three hours of music a day, out of a four or five hour session. |
| So even at this early stage we only record what we think is working, good or different, and interesting. We have at the moment got dozens of these writing tapes, and nine or ten Comps as we call them. We have gone through the whole process again and have at the moment three 'Super-Comps' so we must have four or five hours of snippets of the best things that we have jammed. |
| If you have heard the writing ideas on this site then those are what I'm talking about. Most of these ideas are two to three minutes long at the moment and some of them have a structure to them which just naturally happened with the chemistry in the studio. |
| The big step is where we are at the moment, and this involves deciding what to work on and what to do with it. We can put anything with anything else at this moment. This is where all the craftsmanship and musical honesty comes in to play; we only want to work on the strongest ideas but there are always going to be differences of opinion on some bits. Interestingly enough, though, these are usually things that shouldn't have been at the top of the barrel anyway, but somehow got through. |
| This is a big jump; taking a small idea and trying to recreate the excitement and what made them special. Part of what I like is the pure interaction and knowing that something so good came from nowhere. It is hard sometimes to find out what it is about an idea that is good. It goes way beyond the mere musical chords, notes, and melodies; it could be just one bit of feedback in the right place, the balance of the drums, or just a change of chord right at the end of the whole thing. There can be a real reluctance to change things and work on these ideas because we know how hard it is to create that magic again, and even harder to develop a song that is going to stay that magical al the way through. |
| But that is the stage we are at: we know we have - as always - far too many ideas that we feel excited about. It's just what we do with them next! |
| Pete |
10 Mar 
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