Spirit Valley

We made the record in 4 days!

In a dead apartment...

This is the debut record for the band SOGARD and for me as a producer/mixer/engineer. 

We were supposed only to do 3 singles at first thinking that it would be all we could manage to do in 4 days. After recording the 3 singles on drums, the rest of the band hadn't arrived yet, so Tobias (drummer) said, "Let me just do the whole record" So we did and managed to do all of them in about 4 hours. I should probably explain the "In a dead apartment" part. It sounds creepy, but it wasn't at all. It's just a way of describing that the room the record was cut in was dry and dead-sounding. There was no natural reverb as the floors were covered with carpets ;)

Having the drums all done it was time to do guitar, which is usually the other way around from doing bass right after drums. But we set up 2 amps, a Fender quad reverb cut in half so it had become a dual reverb, and a Marshall JMP reissue through a 2x12 Creamback closed-back cabinet. We used 4 mics in total - Shure 57 x Sennheiser 421 on the Marshall and Shure 57 x Sennheiser E609 on the Fender Quad/Dual Reverb. We got a great tone for Magnus (guitarist/singer) and spent the next day and 1/2 getting down the guitars. While tracking super late in the evening Laurids (bassplayer) got tired and had a nap on the couch in the living room, where the amps were placed, and was roaringly LOUD! He slept right through it. CRAZY!!!

On the 2. day we started recording bass right after we finished guitars. We used the same Sennheiser 421 from the guitar setup, (the old grey one) and a Shure 57 for the tweed of the bass, experimenting. The bass setup was from TC Electronic. Super happy with the tone and we began recording. Hours later smashing through the songs, we had to start thinking about dinner. I (producer) had secured 4 tickets for the last show of the "Electric Guitars" tour of 2023 in Frederica Tøjhuset. We found dinner and had an absolute blast at the show, seeing a lot of familiar faces. After the show, we went back home to record some more bass. When the clock hit 3 am, we were working on the song "Flipside". We weren't 100% happy with the bassline so we sat down and tried to work it out. As time flew by we managed to have a cool new bassline written by Laurids, Tobias, and me. We had such a blast from writing that bassline that we played it on repeat and almost forgot to record it. While we were losing our minds over the bassline Magnus had fallen asleep on the same couch where Laurids had earlier slept while tracking the guitar. Now it was the other way around. Magnus was sleeping RIGHT IN FRONT of the bass amp and cab... It's incredible that he doesn't have hearing loss today...

As our last couple of sessions had gone from 10am - 2am and 12am - 5am we could definetly feel the tiredness slowly crawling in on us. HARD WORK!!! We just had to do some vocals. We got 2 songs down but had to call it for the day. We agreed to do the rest of the vocals another day when everyone, especially Magnus was feeling more energetic.

The band proceeded to record the rest of the vocals on their own while Mikkel had begun a bit of mixing at home.

A couple of months later, the record was shaping into a real record, and every one of us got more and more excited the closer we got!

We had such a great time doing this record and it will forever be something that we think back to as that time where we made THAT reocrd. The record that got it all started for both the band and me.

Now do yourself a favour and go listen to that record from top to bottom!