Interesting problem...

We've just recorded an album with the band CONSTANCIA where the members live in Sweden (Malmö, Stockholm, Karlshamn and Mörrum) and Germany (Münster). We've also just signed a deal with a great Italian label! Now, the twist to the story is that all the members have actually never met! For instance the drummer and singer have never met the bass player and vice versa. The singer hasn't met the keyboard player. Still I think we've really managed to get a great band-feel to the album, basically because we have recorded and then re-recorded some stuff to adjust to what someone else has recorded. I re-recorded a lot of my guitars for the third time after all the vocals were done. It has really paid off!
Now, here comes the tricky bit! The label now want 10 band pics! Uhuh... We managed to get it down to five at this stage, but we still have to fix 5 band pics! So, this weekend I, the drummer and the singer will meet and take a bunch of pics which we will then send to the drummer and keyboard player so they can have their photos taken in the same style and with the same background (preferably white...) and try to "pose" to make it fit with our pics. After this our singer David (who is great at Photoshop) will merge us all together and fix 5 band pics!
The beauty of today's technology :-)

Currently listening to:
CLUTCH - "From Beale Street To Oblivion" - Great riffage!!
COLDSPELL - "Infinite Stargaze" - Swedish debut of the year so far!
BLACK PEARL - s/t - Lisa Tingle rules!!
BLACK SABBATH - "Tyr" - Not their best, but just had to listen to it again

The pre-mix/demo disease

Right now the CONSTANCIA album is being mixed by Fredrik Folkare. We have just received the first version and it sounds awesome! However there's always one disturbing thing, which is my own fault. When I've finished a recording I make a, very rough and very raw, pre-mix. It's not even worth calling a mix actually, more like getting the levels up, some odd delay and compressor on some tracks. It's more of a rough mix I do to check that everything sounds fine before the final mix. Sitting in the mixing room and finding out parts are missing, files are corrupt or there are clicks on the tracks, is not good (to put it mildly). So, I compile all the tracks, clean them up, bounce them to one nice file per track starting at the same starting-point. Then I mix it down to a track, burn it onto a CD and listen the hell out of it to detect and remove any errors before it's too late.
The problem is, when I get the final mix my brain is so set on the pre-mix sound I tend to listen for the wrong things. I've grown to love that really dry and in your face sound, so when I get the final mix I need at least 4-5 times before I "adjust" and reset my brain. Then I can listen unbiased.
It sort of the same way with demo-solos. Some of the best guitar solos are on demos and it's totally impossible to recreate them in the studio. Therefore I now always record the demos with a proper solo sound and to a click, so it's possible to use it in the final recording. Sometimes you get that special feel, tone, lick or whatever that just seems impossible to recreate.

Favourites of the week:
WOLF - Devour - Classic metal!
OPETH - Watershed - Damn this is a great album!!
BLACK PEARL - s/t - Forgotten gemm with Lisa Tingle on vox!
IL ROVESIO DELLA MEDAGLIA - Io Come Io - Killer Italian prog!

New Balls please!

So, it finally came to a halt. Last week the singer decided to leave Balls. Well, to be honest it was "an accident waiting to happen". The "offial" reason, according to him, was that we didn't want to play live or even rehearse. Well... I for one love to play live, so there's actually a bit more behind it than that.
Not to go into too many details, it actually started already during the recording when our singer suddenly put quite a big, and not previously discussed, price tag on his involvement in the recording. That's ok, IF you discuss these matters on beforehand and IF you evalutate other peoples contributions (such as artwork, arrangement etc) using the same price guide. Also IF you, after a weekend of arrangement and song-production decide "let's split things three ways", well... you don't suddenly just retract it and say "I've changed my mind" and then go into a hair-splitting contest where fractions of percent is discussed. That's actually BS.
THEN... to compensate for the economical issue (because the rest of us weren't interested in investing in the recording at the price rate decided by the singer), the rights to the album was owned by the singer and the CD subsequently issued on his label. This means the rest of us would receive no royalty until 1500 copies were sold. In all cases known to me, the members always receive at least 5 free copies. Not in this case though. We had to purchase every single copy ourselves, meaning we had to pay for the record we ourselves played on. When pointing this out, the singer had one of his tantrums and left the band... to return again (if I recall correctly this happened 3-4 times before his final bye-bye).

So, the next step was that he INSISTED that we would empty our calendars for two months to play all available gigs, from pubs to areans (well...) at any cost, to promote the album (from which only he had any income). Some of us has music or work for a living, meaning we would have to play for nothing to gain money for the singer... Does that seem fair? Not to me. So, so be it. We did a bloody good album, and the history may or may not end here. At least I and Micke "Nord" will continue working together. We have already written some great songs (in the same vein as the Balls album) and there's more to come.

Listening to:
Guy McCoy Tormé - "Evil Twin" - Great raw edged hard rock!
Sky High - "Download" - Killer Swedish Hendrixy riffster!
Diamond REO - "Dirty Diamonds" - A classic I can't seem to get out of my CD player!
Black Pearl - s/t - Forgotten gem from '94