Studio Report: part 1

Drummer Mauro Frison, and myself entered Transmission Room Studios on Monday morning to start laying down the tracks for The Brink. The studio itself is a 300 year old converted building in the middle of the countryside in County Longford, Republic of Ireland. With little or no distraction besides the grand piano and various vintage instruments around the place. We spent a bit of time getting the drum kit tuned and miked up with the assistance of our hardworking, sausage roll fueled engineer Mick Cronin. The idea was to go for a real natural sounding kit, which is what we got. Its a great sounding room too, which makes life easier. Once we were all set up the tracks went down quickly, with Mauro nailing most of the songs with his first take. Its always a pleasure to work with musicians who actually bother to learn and practice the songs to that degree. And a rare thing these days. So by the end of day one the drum tracks were already recorded. Hard work, country air, proper sleep.

Onto Tuesday morning and we began with percussion parts, with all three of us contributing to fill out the percussion sections. I had a choice of bass guitar/amp combinations there and ended up going with a vintage Ampeg which I'm told was used by the mighty Boyzone for a while on the road. I figured that was the ideal amp due to what Im aiming for with this album, and what Im about. The bass parts went down fairly quickly as I knew the songs quite well already. Then I finally got my hands on the grand piano and hammond organ that I'd been coveting since Monday morning. This is the first time in my long career that I've had access to this kind of gear when recording an album. Partly because of inexperience, sabotage, the wrong combinations of people, and good old fashioned 'not having my sh*t together'. All in all this session is surpassing my expections so far and its already sounding fairly innovative along with the pre-production stuff that I brought along with me. The perfect location and just the right people to springboard this album process into fruition. I'm lucky to have people like Mauro and Mick onboard.

We'll have some more pics and footage up over the next few days for those who are following this project. Thanks for the interest and support.

Duncan Patterson