WorshipCentral

We finished basic tracking with ‘Because of Your Love’ and ‘Worship The Lord’ coming out really great.

Ron Burgundy: The only way to bag a classy lady is to give her two tickets to the gun show...
Last night we worked really late on a song called ‘Everlasting Arms’, which is kind of different. It starts very chilled and ends up turning into a monster. We messed around in the studio for ages after a curry, and then started jamming around the chords. What came out was very cool and I think this is going to be one of my favourites. We’re all thinking it would be a great closing track, as the chorus repeats and fades really nice. We’re looking at adding a gospel choir later on. This was a really fun session, with lots of feel.

Anyway, once we’d got a few good takes, Alex, Trev and I sat for ages getting some cool guitar sounds for the intro to another song. Alex’s sounds are sensational, really tasty and creative. I’m realising how good the team are. It’s easy to come up with three different sounding songs, but most musos start running out of new grooves or ideas, where as these guys just keep coming up with amazing stuff. It’s really cool to watch.

Then this morning we started a little later and looked at ‘Worship The Lord’, which is a song we’ve used already a lot at church. It’s a really simple song and I’m excited about recording it with a band, as up to now we’ve only had the Worship Central demo. We tracked it and then went for creating lots of space in the song with the arrangement. I think it’s sounding great. Really worshipful.

After lunch we worked on the last song of this session, a new one called ‘Because of Your Love’ which is a big dancy anthem, with lots of jump-up-and-down and driving guitars. I’ve just finished writing this one and have been bouncing it off Tim and Hanif (a friend who I write with) for a couple of weeks. This was probably the song with the least arranged coming into the studio, so we chopped it around a bit. We ended up cutting it right down to just over three minutes to make it super punchy, which makes the song feel very tight. I’m very excited about this one, as it’s going to be really fun to do at church. It ends with this bridge section that goes ‘you came to save the world, your love can save the world’ with these trashy drums all over it, feels quite Killers. We’re now working on the guitar parts to give it loads of energy.

Someone was asking about the band's set-up. Mark Prentice is using three basses (Jazz, precision and five string jazz bass) into an Avalon DI. Paul Evans is using Tama Star Classic kit with a massive floor mounted tom and a bunch of Zilja-whatever cymbals. Then Alex is using a few different guitars: his own telecaster, Gibson 335, then Trev's 72 re-issue custom telecaster, my Rickenbacker (see previous blogs) and a really simple effects rig: tuner, DL4, DD5, Blues Driver and a Whammy, and every now and then an OCD, and a Lovetone Wobulator running everything through an old Vox AC-30. Anyway, that's for you guitar buffs. Sounds awesome anyway.

We’ve finished tracking the drums, bass and first electric guitar and we’re off for a celebratory curry with the team. Tomorrow we’ll come back and listen to the songs through and rework anything we need to. I’ll let you know how it goes!