Rising with the lark for a jolly morning tune

Katie Marie has completed her latest album, and she had to get up early to do it

By Katie Marie, on Thursday, January 19, 2012

Katie Marie has finished her latest album! Photo taken by Lisa (Indigo Blue Photography) and edited by Sandra (Soul Photography)

If you’ve read any of my previous articles you’ll know that I’ve been working away writing and recording my third studio album… and Sunday was the deadline date I’d set myself to get all the audio and mixing finished.

For this album I’ve been writing the tunes as I go. This is because I wanted to try and create a CD that had a nice variety of music on there. So I looked at the list of songs I’d written and recorded each time and wrote according to what seemed to be missing.

I spent all day Saturday and Sunday finishing off mixing what I had already recorded and also writing and recording what I thought would be the last song for the album (which is called Staring at the Pieces). This is the only song on the CD that features a full drum kit set-up (all the others have cajon) and it’s been bloomin ages since I recorded a full kit (and boy it felt good!).

A friend of mine lent me a couple of rather tasty mics to have a play with over the weekend, the first one being a Rode NT4 which I discovered made an amazing overhead for the drums!

Tara Takamine and Kurtis hanging out in the studio

Katie Marie's nice and simple drum kit set up

This is my nice and simple drum kit set up. For the song Staring at the Pieces I wanted have a softer tone for the hi-hat so I used a cajon brush for my right hand and a normal stick for the snare.

The mic-ing set up was nice and easy too – just the Rode NT4 as an overhead, an AKG D112 for the kick and two SM57s top and bottom on the snare. Sounded really lovely.

The other mic I had to play with was a Neumann 103. It felt a little uncomfortable to sing into at first, as I didn’t like the way it was reacting to my vocals. But when I sat down to mix the track I couldn’t believe how my voice just seemed to slice through the mix like a knife and sound crystal clear. Amazing.

For most of the CD I’ve been relying heavily on the powers of the Rode NT1a and for the price it’s an incredible microphone. You can stick pretty much anything tin front of it and it will sound amazing… and put through my TLA compression unit it really sings.

Anyways, enough geeky microphone talk…

On Sunday night I was listening to all that I’d recorded and there seemed to be a lack of what I could only think of as… well… a jolly song lol. Not the sort of thing I write *that* often, but I did feel the CD was in need of a light hearted tune.

As some of you may or may not know, I’m working a ‘proper’ job at the moment between Monday and Friday (eeerg). So the only time I had left to write my jolly song and get it recorded was before and after work. I was up for the challenge and decided to get up at stupid o’clock the following morning to begin my mission… perhaps not the best time for me to write a jolly song, as I don’t do mornings at the best of times! But when it’s all in the name of music, it doesn’t seem quite so terrible.

I can see the moon! Why on earth am I awake?!

At 5am Monday morning I was in my little studio, armed with a mug of tea, pencil and paper and thesaurus. I thought into order to write an uptempo song I’d enlist the aid of my trusty Ukulele (called Kurtis) as lets face it, it’s pretty much impossible to write anything sad on a Ukulele!

Katie Marie's nice and simple drum kit set up

Tara Takamine and Kurtis hanging out in the studio

As I mentioned before, uptempo tunes aren’t exactly my forte, so I though to help me really get into the ‘happy’ zone I’d write down a whole bunch of words that would hopefully sum up my tune. I wrote down stuff like ‘Sunny, bright, authentic, optimistic, witty’. This is a technique that I use quite often if I’m having trouble finding inspiration and it works wonders for getting my creative juices flowing.

Between 5am and 7.30am I managed to write lyrics and music for my jolly tune (yay!). Now it was time to take Molly for a walk and then head off to work and hope that I would feel with it enough to finish recording it after 5pm.

Thankfully the buzz of getting my new tune finished managed to get me through the day and I whizzed back to the studio to record all the bits and bobs for my jolly tune.

By 9.30pm it was all done and dusted. I listened to it with all the other tunes and thankfully I’m happy to report that my album is all finished up!

If you fancy taking a listen to some unmastered clips I’ve uploaded a little sneaky peek to Soundcloud.