New trio album coming!

I just returned from Helsinki where I was mixing Joona Toivanen trio’s new album. This is a band both me, Tapani and the drummer Olavi Louhivuori have played had since we were kids. Olavi had just finished a long US tour with Polish trumpet legend Tomasz Stanko’s quintet, and it was great to meet with the trio again.

Both recording and mixing this album was great fun. We wanted to have a more “retro” sound and used old microhones, tube amplifiers and tape recorders. The sound guy Mikko Raita was very good in creating this kind of sound, and the tubes and tapes were running really hot!

Hip stuff in the studio

It is done! We are done.The recording session is over and we are totally exhausted. Stylistically, many of our new tunes are more or less jazz, but some takes actually hold a hip beat. Super beat.  We do now have 14 tracks on tape which is more than excellent! The next couple of weeks we will spend many hours listening to the music and try to decide what tunes to put on the CD – that’s not an easy task.

The schedules of the days were about like this:

08:00 The angry alarm screams – time to wake up. Some of us had a light headache

10:00 The recording session begins. Lot’s of noise and voices during a couple of hours. Some tears also.

13:00 Time to take a short break – we went outside and casted with a fly rod. Håvard snapped the leader. Very funny.

16:10 Lunch – Plenty of food and bullshit.

17:00 Recording session…

19:00 Coffee and more coffee. Then tears and even more coffee.

20:00 Stop playing god damn it!

20:30 Spa

Mood from the studio

It’s been a great success.

Håvard was shouting “let out it!” to the mics, and Freddy was counting one two three four… The feeling was there for the album to be born.

Nine pieces recorded in two days. It sounds that it’s quite a lot of work, and that it is. Tapani’s hands are sore from beating the bass, but still, these couple of days in the studio resemble our summer tour in the intensity of output. We want to do this, and we’re pushing it. Now the setting is done, the tunes are finished  and we know our stuff.

Still, we had had the usual problems of a jazz band, this time with the coffee machine. The modern Italian-look coffee maker tried to slow us down, but Johannes, the sound engineer, knew how to fill the bean section and saved our session. The point in recording a full length album, where you need the the espresso, will present itself at some point.

At the moment, we have listened through the selected takes. We have recorded two days, made 46 minutes of good and solid material and we still have one day left at the studio.

As Håvardi says, now we have a great opportunity to choose what the album needs, as we already have the ingredients to make it. So Monday is going to be a day of free creating without pressure. Hopefully all this is ending as a great success!

I’m sorry

I´m sorry. I was very tired when I wrote the last blog late last night… That´s why it was kind of minimalistic.

About the fishing… well, what can I say? We simply don’t have the time to fish right now. The good news is that the ice is melting right now!

We´ve been working really hard in the studio – and the hard work is paying off! We´ve recorded 9 songs so far, and we´re pretty pleased with the result.

Studio Epidemin in Gothenburg is a really good studio – they have state of the art gear. And more importantly, the recording engineer – Johannes Lundberg -  is awesome. We´re pretty excited at the moment, and we still have one day of recording left. Life is good!

P.S. Pics are coming within a couple of hours, stay where you are!

Recording

We’re recording. It´s fun!

Gothenburg here we come!

It’s 10.30 PM in the evening. I talked to Håvard a moment ago, he just arrived at the Central Station in Gothenburg, trying to get in touch with Fredrik. Then Fredrik called me, trying to get in touch with Håvard. Then I got a message from Håvard that he was hanging out with some nice people (not Fredrik) in a pub. Well, I hope they will find each other. Me and Tapani have been chilling out at my place and had a little jam session to warm up for the recordings tomorrow. We even came up with some hip new chords that we might try for some tunes.

So tomorrow it’s a big breakfast and then we’re off for the studio!