Owz about that then?

Our much awaited recording day at Studiowz finally arrived and it was a cracker! Oh my goodness, what a day. The studio is located in the picturesque surroundings of Clarbeston Road, near Haverfordwest and is a converted chapel designed and built by owner/engineer Owain Fleetwood Jenkins. From the moment we arrived at the studio we were blown away by the splendour of the building to the state of the art and vintage equipment alike to the attitude and total professionalism shown to us by Owain. It was absolutely brilliant and we can't wait to do it all again soon! The day went really well, thanks to Owain's meticulous yet laid back working practice. He certainly got the best out of us, offered advice when called upon and made us feel incredibly comfortable behind the mic.

We kicked off recording 5 of our favourite tracks with just the rhythm section and lead vocalist. The horn section offered support from the gallery in the guise of eating chocolate cakes, kindly donated to us by our very own bass guitarist (Chris) wife, Vicky, who is the owner of Little Owls Bakery - be sure to check her out, her cakes are delicious! 🧁 Charlotte, our vocalist was in her own little booth to start off with and used her vocal lines as a guide for the rhythm section to record their parts together. Craig, our drummer was also isolated, with a fine selection of mics to capture a variety of different sounds from his kit whilst Kate on keys, Matthew on guitar and Chris on bass were centre stage in the heart of the studio. We were honoured to be joined by our good friend Darrel, a keen photographer who captured some fabulous images of the day too., what a star ⭐️

Darrel explained to us "It may interest you to know the tone of these images is from an old Fujifilm film emulsion called ‘Eterna’ but they used to do a trick by not carrying out a ‘bleach bypass’ when developing the movie film this caused the the film to produce a silver / black and white tone over the colour film. It also enhanced the grain in the image - this simulation is embedded in Fuji cameras so this is the exact output from the camera and one of the reason I like Fuji".

After lunch, it was time for the brass section to get warmed up and ready to record their parts. Once again, the afternoon session ran smoothly thanks to Owain's professionalism (and patience) and we managed to record all 5 tracks with very little fuss which allowed us time to multitrack some extra brass parts, a section 'clap' (watch the video) and Craig absolutely nailed some 4 part harmony to one of our tracks too! It's a shame we didn't know in advance that Owain was also a trombone player otherwise we would've asked him to play along on one of tracks.

So, what's next? We're currently in the planning stages of making a video showreel to compliment the audio recordings......which is going to be exciting! Watch this space. 🎦

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/52a1d5_fb6f6422ad96494e94e77b24bc2d6374/360p/mp4/file.mp4