Songs are mixed

Yup, we got the final mixes from J. Robbins and they sound fan-fucking-tastic! It seems J. really knew what we wanted and he got the best out of those tracks. I've been listening to this so many times now and yet I still get goose bumps.Now the hard part is to choose what songs make the cut! We want to do vinyl of this album as well, and with 11 songs and around 46 minutes of music, we need to leave out one song to keep the vinyl sounding good. If you put more than 22 minutes of music on one side of an LP it will not sound as good as we want it to, so it's really needed. Unfortunately we don't agree among the three of us which song to leave out so it's a little difficult. But we'll work it out.

Oh, and on a more personal note; I got a son a few weeks ago! A beautiful boy who has turned my world upside down. It's incredible becoming a parent. I feel like the luckiest man on earth!

Best
Mikkel / Barra Head

Mixing and mastering

Time for an update...
We got everything mixed by Tim, but we had some doubts about some of the mixes. So we got in touch with J. Robbins again, and fortunately he agreed to give it a shot. Some of you might know that we have already been in touch with J. Robbins before. He was supposed to record the album back in january, but due to his son's severe illness, he couldn't come to Europe to record with us. But now it looks like he will be part of the project anyway, which is just fantastic. He will mix it in his Magpie Cage studio later this month. We have admired J. Robbins' work for many years, as a musician and songwriter in Goverment Issue, Jawbox, Burning Airlines and Channels and as a producer and mixer for bands like Against Me, Faraquet, Promise Ring and many others. We can't wait to hear what J. can do with our recordings. The album will be mastered at West West Side Music by Alan Douches, who has mastered just about every cool band on the planet. We've checked the liner notes on some of our favourite records. His clients include bands like Converge, Sufjan Stevens and Mastodon, just to name a few. And well, those records sound amazing. We're so excited, can't wait to get the final result.
We'll be back later!

Mikkel / Barra Head

Update

We hoped to have the mixing done by now but we ran into some trouble and it's still not completely done. We'll let you know when we have news.

But we started thinking about the cover art work. The incredibly talented artist Sarah Bodil Hansen is doing the design for the album as well as some video stuff. We've met with her and she has some really interesting ideas. She also madesome sketches and it looks fantastic. She shot a couple of photos of us looking ridiculous as usual, but she said it didn't matter, since she weren't gonna use our faces. I told you we looked ridiculous!

Thursday July 12th

This morning we did the final touches... A couple of strokes on the piano, a background vocal here and there, and that was it. The album is recorded. It has been a lot of hard work, but we're really satisfied with the result. Now we're sending everything to New York, where Tim is gonna mix it. The plan is to also have it mastered there, Tim had some good ideas for great mastering studios.

The album might be recorded but there's still a long way to go and the blog will stay active. We'll inform you about cover art work and the further process in making this album happen. We'll post more photos and hopefully videos very soon.

Later

Mikkel / Barra Head

Wednesday July 11th

We worked hard and fast today. We did a lot of guitars for Some Wars, for From Hope Comes
Doubt and some for Common Ground. We got Jakob's percussion takes which sounds fantastic by the way, and got them added to the sessions. Then vocals for Legitimate, vocals for Accept
The Risk and some vocals for Gradiska... and then off to sleep...

Mikkel / Barra Head

Tuesday July 10th

It was nice having some days off and getting a bit of distance to the recordings. Arvid went to Roskilde Festival, Jakob recorded some percussion on his own and went back to work and I spent time with my wife trying to organize things for our baby, which is to be born pretty soon. But now I'm back on my own here in Hamburg, and it feels good to be in Ton Hotel again. The songs sound fantastic to my ears! I still need to do a couple of vocals, some guitars here and there and maybe even an occational piano part... we'll see. Udo and I decided to just take it easy and do whatever comes to mind. We started with One By One, which is probably the song on the album that sounds less like anything we've ever done. We added some electronics to it and it's almost a danceable tune now. It was quite hard getting the vocals sound right for this, but we finally got a decent take... Actually it was great, but just so hard getting it sound right. After this we did vocals for Iron To Skin, which is more aggressive... It was great to yell those lyrics out and we got a super take. We also recorded some guitars for Legitimate, and after this we were too tired to work any longer...

Mikkel / Barra Head

Tuesday July 3rd

Udo and I spent a lot of time with technical stuff making rough mixes of all the songs for Jakob. He needed them to record some percussion tracks to back home in Copenhagen. We also got some good stuff recorded though. We recorded vocals for Somebody's Floor and One By One and some guitars here and there. The rest of the day was spent doing back-ups. At this point it is clear that we will not be done in time. The delays we had in the beginning of the recording period have made the last days pretty stressful, and you just can't make a good album if you're feeling stressed out. Udo, as the incredible kind man he is, has promised us that I can come back two or three days next week to finish things off. We need to do a couple of vocal tracks and some guitar. This way we will get to relax a couple of days and clear our heads before we do the last vocals and finishing touches. I'm looking forward to a break. I'll be back with the blog next week!

Mikkel / Barra Head