WorshipCentral

We've just finished the final stages of production and it's a fascinating process.

Last time I updated this we were on Day 8 of the recording process, with additional guitars being done in Nashville and a bunch of keyboards being added in the UK. I made it down for the keyboard session, and it was amazing. Mark Edwards, who's an incredible player, let rip on a variety of keyboard things, from a Hammond organ to one of those little pump organs the Beatles used in Strawberry Field (I think it's called a melletron). They all sound stunning.

Then we had a session with a gospel choir, which sounds incredible. There's one song called 'Everlasting Arms' that we wanted to end with a massive gospel feel, and one of the musical reference we'd all been talking about was the Primal Scream track 'Movin' On Up'. Lawrence Johnston, who arranged the choir, turns round to the producer and mentioned that he'd actually done that arrangement on the Primal Scream record. Needless to say, it was a pretty cool session, and the track sounds amazing. I'm really excited about this one.

Then all the tracks were sent by courier on a massive hard drive to Joe Baldridge, the mix engineer. Joe's a fantastic engineer, who has worked Beck, DC Talk, Tree63 and a bunch of other people. He is based in Nashville and set to work on mixing each track by stripping everything back to zero. He then would start eq'ing and adding effects to each individual part of the track, and in some cases there are 60+ tracks on a song, so it's a pretty intense job. Once he's worked through a song, he'll leave it and move onto the next one. The whole process takes about a day per track.

Once the tracks are finished, he'll upload them to an FTP site, and send everyone a link to listen to. We all feed in our comments and then he'll make changes. The whole process is a nail-biting matter of moving by minute degrees. Turning up one guitar can either add energy or kill the song. Eventually when everyone on the production team (Producer Trevor Michael, Exec producers Adrian Thompson, Les Moir and Tim Hughes) is happy, we sign off on the finished mixes, and they're uploaded to the mastering studio.

We mastered the album with a guy called Ray Staff, who is based at the top of Centre Point, one of London's tallest buildings. Needless to say, the view from his studio is pretty much the coolest view in London. Ray has mastered literally thousands of albums in his career, from Led Zep to Bowie, through to stuff in the charts at the moment. He's a real legend. The mastering studio is where you arrange the tracks in their track listing and add final tweaks to the sound. Ray has an amazing pair of ears that hear the smallest detail in the song. We all sat in the studio with him and we'd say something like 'could bring up the bass guitar there' and he'd instantly tweak a series of buttons and, completely from memory, find the sub-sonic frequency to pull that instrument up in the song. He does this by doing the maths on the sonic eq in his head, and it was bewildering to watch!

I really enjoyed the mastering, as there was a really good vibe in the studio and we're all pleased with how the record's sounding. It's a great feeling to walk away with a finished copy of the album.

We also have been working on a design for the artwork, with Delirious' drummer and creative director Stew Smith. Stew has just recently announced he'll be leaving the band later in the year to go full time as a graphic designer, so it was a real privilege having him work on this design. We talked about concepts for the artwork and ended up shooting a concept with photographer Andy Hutch that everyone is really pleased with.

The album is called 'Future Sound' and is out on the 15th March and will be available at the London Worship Central day. Here’s a sneak preview of what the cover is going to look like: