New Pete Diary 5/26

[L. Bird]

http://www.petetownshend.co.uk/diary/display.cfm?id=284&zone=diary

26 May 2006
We've finished recording

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  Today we finished recording. Roger was doing vocals with Billy Nicholls 
and Bob Pridden at Eel Pie Oceanic Studios; Rachel and me were at my home 
studio recording a string quartet on Trilby's Piano one of the pieces for 
the extended Mini-Opera,

I will complete the mixing in a week or two. It's a great feeling to be 
finished. I might have a few very small things to do when I come to mix, but 
99% is done.

I hope everything fits together once it's mixed - compiling an album is a 
tricky time. Sometimes tracks that have felt critical to the album have to 
be left out simply because they don't feel quite right in context, or 
because they seem too proud, too rough, too plain, too subdued or too 
different.

Roger said recently in an interview that he only likes to work on songs I've 
written that have 'edge'. And yet sometimes to make a collection of songs 
flow properly, you might need a track with no edge at all, a track with no 
character, no particular mood, a track that exists purely to set up the 
tracks that follow.

Recording strings today was really enjoyable. I had knocked up a string 
orchestration on the Sibelius computer programme for my song Trilby's Piano 
and scored it for about 35 strings. Rachel re-arranged it for a string 
quartet, with some overdubs, and today we recorded it with a single stereo 
ribbon mike in my home studio, with the smallest dogs running in and out. 
Rachel is pretty classy at this kind of thing and really made it all seem 
very transparent. Brian Beaver of In The Attic fame shot some video that 
Rachel may use in the next show.