Dband: Liar In Disguise
The result of my first recording session with Dband is now available. Liar In Disguise is actually something that we wrote on the first day I met up with the band in January. When I turned up James and Luke were warming up around chorused fingerstyle guitar riff and once I’d set up we jammed over it for a bit. I wondered whether it would work to stick a minor third key change in for a chorus, so we tried that and we also added a moody instrumental break in the middle to give the Hammond — new to Dband’s sound — a little chance to breathe. By the end of the session it felt like we had pretty finished the structure of the song.
Luke tweaked the lyrics over the coming months as we hunted for a rhythm section and I added a backing vocal emphasis to the chorus. Shemeck’s arrival on bass gave the middle section a new twist to the rhythm, and when the time came to book a recording studio this was first on our hit list.
We recorded at Martin Smith’s studio in Sussex and for the first time in memory the engineer was keen to record the Leslie (well Motion Sound) directly with mics rather than take the easy option of DIing the stereo feed. It sounds gorgeous, even if it meant me having to solder together an improvised pedal to drive the rotor speed, having been using the built in Leslie simulator for so long that I no longer had a functioning Motion Sound pedal of my own.
There’s still some clean-up to be done but you can listen to the rough mix on Shemeck’s SoundCloud page.
One upshot of this from a gear perspective is that I forked out for a proper Motion Sound adapter box built by Bob Rinker. I’m not sure whether I’ve got the scope for miking up the amp in my home studio, but should I be in a studio with an accommodating engineer in the future, I want to be ready.
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