My friend Yela is leaving London to go to live in Madrid. He'll go on holiday to LA before. And we wanted to make a meeting/recording to say goodbye to him. He self-proclaimed leader of the song and he wanted something that sounded like the 4th wave of emo. As he was explaining to us the emo music has stepped 4 stages, and the 4th one is more related with the 2nd where we can place bands like Sunny Day Real State. He hate the 3rd one, bands like Bullet From My Ballantine and things like that wearing black and with stupid hair. Mata came around too to contribute with his peculiar creativity.
Thoughts: The first thing that I noticed when they arrived at my home was that it was very late, 8:30 or so. Yela (or Leya) sat us in a table and started to talk us about what he wanted and he said that the first and most important thing was to drink a beer all of us, very nice command. He would make the lyrics and advise me on which notes to play. So first beer is finished and we are ready to go, wait... Yela needs to smoke first. I set up everything in the room in the meanwhile. He comes and he told me that he wants this: he sings a melody while playing air guitar. I catch the idea and I make a guitar for that, he likes it; yeah! Some takes later I get it and he goes to smoke more while I try things with the drums, when he comes back I show him what I have and he likes it, just few things that are not quite good and he asks me for more freedom. Two takes later we are ready for the bass, I just grab it and play almost the same than the guitar, first take is good but could be better and in the final climax he wants me to play much more freely, I'm not a bass player and I can't improvise very well but I do an attempt and it works! Cool. Then the keyboards, he wants a piano sounding like a Kanye West song that he has in his mind. We struggle to figure it out, they Mata and Yela have something in mind but they don't tell me what exactly, Mata when we play the song just say: THERE!!! and nothing else, I'm suppose to read his mind, but finally they came with the melody and we record it. Then strings, I record the chords with some inversions and works good but I only record one progression and then I copy/paste them and I don't know why I struggle a lot, so Yela takes advantage and goes to smoke another cigarette. All this time we have been drinking and starts to be more obvious. He have more crazy ideas and we are laughing loud, Mata specially, he has a laugh that overstep the human range of level pressure. Yela is figuring out the melody of the voice while he thinks about the lyrics, I'm his scribe with my computer and he dictates me. He has talent to find rhymes and metaphores without any effort. It's getting late now. I don't want to make some noise but, what the hell, we are recording and having fun, some people have parties time to time and make noise. Jools has come home and Yela feels a bit restrained to sing. I pass him the SM58 (I didn't want to set the Rodes, too much) and he started to sing, changing all the time the distance between him and the mic, and changing the level of his voice (he were gaining confidence and singing louder). He can't breath since the melody never stops, so we decide to record odd phrases and after even phrases. After few attempts it works and we are ready to top off with a choir. We three at almost 12 in the night screaming punk ooooooohs very bad, we had to simplify the melody because we are doing it very bad. Finally we finish and Yela says something like: 'Hey it's late, make a mix and we'll go'. I start doing it but it takes a lot, the voices are so unbalanced... so they leave and I would send them the mix the next day (I wanted to rest as well).
Great day, great fun, great hangover and best wishes to our friend. Bye Leya, we'll miss you.
Enjoy it!
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