Recording Accidental Tourist’s debut album by Tomás Mulcahy, producer.
Created Fri, Jun 18, 2004
Revised Wed, Feb 2, 2005

Sunday October 5th 2003: Started demos.
This was a very important part of the process, because Ray wasn’t wholly comfortable in a studio situation. At the beginning, I had to enlist the help of Paddy Power, but after a while Ray’s confidence grew. This was due to a combination of positive feedback and vocal coaching from his singing teacher. Ray has written over 100 songs. We auditioned about 30 of these, and decided on 11 “band” songs and 4 “solo” songs.

Wednesday Jan 7th to 23rd 2004: Rehearsing and tracking with the band.
Mark the guitarist was an old friend of mine from the music course in Tramore road. We had written some instrumentals together, so I knew he was a good person to collaborate with. He had just started gigging with Mick and Barry as a covers band, so that was our rhythm section sorted out. They are all jazz musicians, and it was great to work with such talented and flexible people. The only slight problem was that sometimes they overplayed, which often happens with musicians who are as competent as they are. But the lads were totally open to suggestions, and not at all precious about their parts. It was a very creative partnership. This is by far the best drum sound I’ve ever got- mainly due to the fact that Mick is a great player and really knows how to tune the kit for timbre. Whenever I felt the need for a different snare or tom sound, Mick would have it done in less than 5 minutes. It was a joy not to have to mess around with studio processing to get the sounds- all I had to do was ask Mick, or move a mike slightly. It also helped that I had plenty of time and a wide choice of mikes. The room we recorded in was in Ray’s house. It’s quite big, about 35’x16’x9’ with a lot of big windows. The drums sounded great with the blinds up, so that’s the ambience you hear on the record. I had just bought an Amek desk which has great mic pres and eq, so that was a factor also. It’s actually a broadcast desk, built in 1985. It was originally from Sulán studios in Ballyvourney, and then it lived for a while in UCC.

Jan 26th- April 26th: vocals (mostly) various overdubs and “sweetening” such as percussion. OK, that seems a bit glib, because there was a total of over 200 hours of work! This is actually a very important process. We did some editing on the arrangements, because occasionally the band improvised an ending, or did two solo sections. This was good because we ended up with very good song structures. A lot of time was spent on the acoustic guitar sounds especially. What follows is a detailed account of each song.

I gave the band arrangement notes in December, to go with the demos Ray and I had recorded. Looking at these notes now, things turned out pretty much as I planned. The major exception is that we dumped 3 out of the 11 songs Ray and I had decided would be “band” songs. Two songs feature material from the original demo- Angeline has the keyboard line in the chorus and my octave doubled bass guitar, and No Heroes has Ray’s cool Strat arpeggio. Mick was excellent at keeping tempo- most of the songs are at the base tempos Ray and I decided on at demo stage, so flying in those parts was fairly easy. We didn’t use any click. It would’ve been pointless to programme proper click tracks with tempo changes for every song because the band already had a nice groove going, so there was no sense in removing that and reconstructing it artificially.

The Chance Meeting did become faster though, which is an interesting anecdote. Looking at the tracksheets, the master take (Jan. 14th) was marked “angry”. The talkback system wasn’t working very well. Mick was in the big room and the rest of the band was in the kitchen. He got very annoyed because no- one was listening to him (actually, they simply couldn’t hear him because of a technical hitch...). Instead of taking a break or having a big discussion, I got them to go straight in to another take. His anger was inflicted on the drums, and it sounded great. We did a couple more takes, but that was the magical one. After that, we got a Bose PA in the kitchen because we didn’t want too much anger on the album! This song was a real band arrangement which came together really quickly. The take was almost a jam session- that’s why Mark has two solos on it. I removed 8 bars after the last verse to tighten up the arrangement. Ray had the idea to get Joe O’Callaghan to play harmonica. It was very hard to capture his energy because he was very nervous in the studio. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to get him in the mood and create the right vibe, so that’s why there are just little touches here and there.

On this project, I was in record all the time. This was not a big deal with 10 inputs and an 80 Gig hard drive, recording in 24 bit/ 48 kHz. I never managed to fill the drive. It was great because I had ample time to set up and experiment with mic choices and positions. I even recorded all the rehearsals, while I experimented with sounds. The first two thirds of Seashells (Jan 19th) is actually the first time the band played it together! The rest is take 2. See if you can spot the join; I actually had the snare drum mic in a different spot for the run through... Mark’s great solo in Stop the Lights is actually flown in from the run through onto take 2 (Jan 9th). All proof that magic can be captured with the “always in record” approach. Recording on hard disk instead of tape allowed me to use all the good stuff from different takes without any headaches. It also makes multiple take far easier to manage- instead of track sheets, you have actual files with dates etc. If something doesn’t work, you just delete it. This saves trawling through hours of tape trying to figure out what works artistically and what doesn’t. With HD these qualitative decisions can be made in the moment, so that they are emotionally informed.

I didn’t backup any of the rehearsals because there was just too much data, so the only real source of anthology materials are the demos from before Christmas ‘03. The recordings of the rehearsals was effective though, because the band used them as notes for the sessions. For example, Marks two guitar lines on Won’t you come along? would’ve been forgotten about if I hadn’t recorded the rehearsals. As it is, there are 18 data CDs worth of backups, which equates to 12.6 Gigabytes. Maybe I’ll use DVD the next time!

Stop the lights has the best intro. Marks acoustic guitar line was again a result of the always record approach- we were tracking power chords, and he started messing about with the intro. He didn’t think much of it, but I’m really glad we got it down. I know he’s proud of it now, a moment of spontaneity! A similar thing happened with the end of Won’t you come along? where he was doing this kind of multiple hammer on thing in the style of Satriani I think. I got him to play around the scale of the song and multitracked it, and that’s the nice shimmery guitar effect at the end of the song. It really helped to evoke that relaxing in then sun vibe that we were after. Double tracked hi string guitar worked brilliantly- we had tried everything else, and in desperation I suggested that. The Monty Python style male voice choir was a bit of a fluke. I’ve always loved that singing crowd effect as on, for example, Budapest by Blimp by Thomas Dolby. Ken had the idea of doing a harmony and it sounded great. So I didn’t get exactly what I was after, but we got something else that worked well. The song is a juxtaposition of feeling depressed and having a laugh, so overall it’s quite cathartic. It was the hardest song to do, because we couldn’t figure out how to structure it or arrange it. So we threw a lot of overdubs at it, and it eventually came together during mixing. During tracking, we started with a Hawaiian vibe which to me sounded way too safe, too typically Irish singer songwriter. Then I suggested a Nine Inch Nails vibe, which Mark was delighted with, because his first idea when he heard the demo was the Nirvana style chorused overdrive guitar. In fact, that was a major turning point in the sessions, because then the band knew that all of their ideas were of value. Prior to that, they had been playing it safe.

My sister and I is I think the best song on the album, the most emotional. We did 3 takes on the vocals, but Ray started crying on the last one. So we left it at that. When it came time to compile, I was very wary of spoiling the emotion in it. So the first verse is mostly take 2, and the rest is take 3.
We borrowed a load of percussion bits from Brian Callnan in Jeffer’s Music, Cork, and I got welts doing the tambourine parts. I’m also quite proud of the shaker on Wayward Bus. Ray did the rattle. All the percussion except the rattle was recorded with the STC 4038 ribbon mic. I set up a baffle behind it (a qult) and for tambourine I added some 6k shelving on the Amek. Very nice eq, I used it to track the snare also.

When my madtheory writing partner Ken suggested a trumpet for Wayward Bus, it was fortunate that Barry was also a great trumpet player. I got really carried away with that song and wrote far more than was necessary, but I’m very proud of it. It was a great experience working so closely with a good player, and having to “speak” in Bb instead of concert pitch (the trumpet is one of those awkward legacies of 19th century music technology, a transposing instrument). Having the strings so far back in the mix was Ray’s idea and it works beautifully. I made the classic mistake of getting too attached to the parts I had written, so you could say that Ray really produced that song!

French Church Street was one of the real surprise songs. Ray never thought much of it, but I always felt it had a magical atmosphere. It captured a moment, just like Wayward Bus. I’m very pleased with my tabla playing. It probably sounds a bit odd to a South Indian musician, because I did it all with samples. The Emu library has a complete set of all the official tabla sounds, such as dha, dhing etc. I played the tablas live, very much ahead of the beat as two separate overdubs, and I also tuned them down to match the key- just as an Indian musician would. The keyboard bass part was heavily quantised however. The Emu dulcimer also worked really well- originally I was imagining a battered piano sound. This song features the most obvious use of my favourite trick on this album- the high string guitar. We got a normal acoustic guitar and a set of 12 string strings, and we used only the high ones from the set. When layered with a normal acoustic guitar it sounds much clearer and more expansive than a straight 12 string does.

The Girl Next Door was another surprise song. I put down a keyboard bass and pad arrangement, with a weird synth pizz sound. When it came time to do the demo CD for the band, I routed my 3 tracks to the one instrument, a 70s style string synth called Cheeze Machine. It really enhanced the atmosphere of the song. When we did it for real, I got Ray to use his nylon stringed guitar, and then it was magic. This atmosphere helped him to do a great vocal.

Perfect Girl was another song with a painful birth. The band did a good solid, basic arrangement of it. Mark made a cool sound with his wah wah and the big 7th chords. However, it didn’t seem to be coming together in the mix. I put down a straightforward pad sound, but it still wasn’t right. I massaged Mark’s wah sounds a bit more, and added another pad sound with a different chord voicing, using a sound sampled from the Korg Wavestation. I also had to be extra careful with the dynamics of the song- the peak is at 1’47”- so I made sure not to overcompress any of the parts in mixing. It came together brilliantly in the end, but it was the very last mix to be completed.

Hey Dad was an apparently simple song, but it was a long time before I was happy with Ray’s guitar sound. The first good take was recorded with the two AT mics as a stereo pair on Ray’s voice and guitar. The vibe was good, but the vocal was a bit lost in the balance. We tried to record this song every which way. Different rooms, mics, baffles etc. Eventually, we tracked vocal and guitar separately. I used the Coles ribbon mic on Ray’s Martin guitar, about 8” distant with baffles around him, on the wooden floored half of the room. The Coles needed some eq, but it captured a wonderful child- like tone, which really suited the vibe of the song. One of the best on the album I think.


Instrument and microphone list:
Snare-
Beyer M58 omnidirectional dynamic
Kick-
AKG D112
Toms-
AKG clip on condensers from AKG mic kit.
I would've preferred Sennheiser dynamics.
Overheads-
Audio Technica AT4033a, pad on, HPF out.
Mark's gtr-
Shure Unisphere 515SB (old SM57).
Overdrive for Fender deluxe amp- barcus berry super booster.
Chorus was a vintage Boss CE-2.
Ray's vocals-
AT4033a
AKG C 414 B ULS (can't remember which song though! Also used as a room mic in fig. 8 for some guitars).

Ray's Guitar-
white 80s strat into AC50 with Shure SM57.
Boss CE-3 for occasional chorusing.
Coles 4038-
I've put this mic in a class of it's own, because it has such a great colour.
Tambourine, shaker, and acoustic guitar on Hey Dad.
Also used on mono high string guitar parts for double tracking.

AT4033a on rattlesnake in Wayward Bus, played by Ray.
Stereo pair for acoustic guitars-
Gefell M300 & Peavey PVM480.

Bass-
DI from Warwick via Boss line mixer.
Unbalanced into Layla.
Overdubs done using LA Audio MLX 20 for DI.
Acoustic bass-
pickup, or AT4033a positioned close.
This guitar is a 1980 Eko, an Italian custom job. Acoustically weak, but fabulous sound when close miked. Thanks Terry!

Tomás’s keys:
Emu ESI4000 sampler with XXL, Emu and Ilio/Synclavier sound libraries for pads and percussion. I used the Emu dulcimer on French Church Street, Peter Siedczalik layered strings on Wayward Bus, and a Fairlight CMI pad on Seashells.
Waldorf PPG Wave 2.V on Angeline.
Big Tick Cheeze Machine on The Girl Next Door.
Steinberg VB-1 for bass on French Church Street.
The last two I used originally just to get the ideas down. I tried to "improve" the sounds later, but the magic was already there so we left them alone. It just shows that it's not about gear!