Very much alive at the desk.
Jarrod Murphy – very much alive at the desk.

Ah the internet – the best thing to ever happen to mankind. Big call I know, but it really is an awesome bit of technology. It has made it possible to get virtually any piece of information you require, buy anything you want, catch up with long lost friends, and make albums via correspondence. And so it is through the internet that my friend Jarrod Murphy and I commence our project.

He sent me a few demos that he’d “whipped together” and loosely entitled  them Dead At The Desk. He saw them as something akin to a broadway musical, and as such, the demos were very theatrical in nature. It’s all BIG. Big orchestration, big backing vocals, big production.

As usual I was blown away by these songs. He never ceases to amaze me with his talent. Never quite worked out why he is not yet super famous. Then again, I haven’t worked out why I’m not super famous either (maybe something to do with my own talent).

Anyway, Jarrod sent me 7 or 8 songs in total, but we decided to kick off with 2 – 3. He needed time to reprogram some of the songs, and so it was a few weeks later when the first of the tracks appeared on our Boxnet account.

2 songs hit my computer in quick succession – Someone Else For A Day and the absolutely over the top Getting Out. These came as Reason files and I was impressed by Jarrod’s thought process and orchestration. He’s also become a bit of a piano player. He’s drum programming wasn’t so good though, but it wasn’t that important anyway, as we’ll be replacing those parts with real drums later on down the line.

So with the Reason files I head in to the SSL Studio. Keen to hear them through some decent monitoring. My assistant for this evening is Antonia Gauci, an audio student at AIM. Together we set about the task of organising the Reason tracks, get them rewired into Pro Tools and then go about changing some of the sounds. We did this by either working directly with the Reason file, or importing it into Pro Tools and using the instruments from there. I discover that neither program has a decent harpsichord sound – this is an absolute must for this project.

One of the sounds that we needed to replace was the piano in Someone Else For A Day. We settled on the new piano in Pro Tools 8, called Mini Grand. Also replaced was the organ sound – again using another Digidesign software instrument; this one called the DB33. Both of these software instruments come standard with Pro Tools 8.

Pretty straightforward night, though the computer in the SSL studio is noticeably slower than the one in the Icon room. But I will grant you that even at this early stage, there is a lot going on in these tracks.

I’m really excited about the prospect of this project. I’ll be recording so many different instruments, using so many different people. It’s going to be fun, fun, fun.