In January 2020, Abrazos spent 3 hours or so recording with the amazing Dave Sloan (Bitterman guitarist, genius sound engineer and all round technical wizz) at the Fishtank in Portsmouth. We released that initially as a limited USB stick & zine and the tracks will be coming out on a split 7” with Brain Anguish in the next few months. We were so pleased with Dave’s work we booked ourselves up to record another 8 songs on 7 November 2020. We had a couple of months between lockdowns in which we were able to practice and we were all geared up to lay down these songs and then on 31 October, a national lockdown was announced starting on 5 November. We were gutted! But we hoped that maybe in December we would be able to do the recording. Of course, during December we couldn’t even practice, let alone record, as the tier we were in didn’t permit it. Then a full national lockdown was announced starting on Boxing Day.

Although as a band we’d kept up communication and made some videos, we got to thinking that by the time we got back together we might have forgotten half of the songs. It’s worth pointing here that we would often forget between practices that we had changed a song until someone deciphered some scribbles one of us had made the fortnight before.

Spurred on by this thought, Tony went out and bought an electronic drum kit. Actually he didn’t go out, cos no-one was allowed to go out. He ordered an electronic kit. And he was able to record himself on his computer. This was a game changer!! I had already been recording some music from home for a couple of projects so started thinking about how we could pull together something “just for us to listen to”.

Initially Tony found the electronic snare a little difficult as it was so bouncy he was hitting it twice every time, but with perseverance he managed to get his traditional “one beat” back on track.

Luckily we had some ropey mobile phone recordings of songs from practices so Tony had something to play along with in his headphones. The only problem we had was that the high-hats were too loud. Other than that, we knew we were in business.

For vocals we figured as long as the song was playing in headphones, Tony could just sing at his phone. But it didn’t quite work out quite right, so he bought a special lead enabling him to plug a microphone into his computer. But it bounced off the wall with a bit of echo, so Tony had to go and sing in a cupboard.

Tony laid down the drums and vocals for 6 of the 8 songs we had originally decided to record and sent them over to me.

I (Nath) lined the drum tracks up with the practice recording and then made sure the vocals were lined up…..well, sort of. Then I set up my guitar amp in the bedroom/office at home, putting it through an old PA speaker I have lying around, and laid down some guitar. My beloved SM58 microphone ran into a 4 track mixer which was connected to the PC and that was that sorted. I couldn’t crank it up to proper voume due to the neighbours as we live in a terrace.

So far so good. We had drums, half the vocals and some guitar. We still had a problem with the hi-hats being louder than they would be on a real drumkit. Normally when you record you have separate track for the snare, the kick drum, the hi-hats, each tom and the cymbals, so it’s a simple matter of pushing a fader down. We had our drums all mixed into one track so we had to improvise. I created 3 duplicates of the drum track and then on one I boosted all the low frequencies, on another I boosted the mid frequencies around where the snare sound lives, and the third was left as is. Mixing the three together we were able to bump up the snare and kick drum enough so that the hi-hats sounded okay. Not ideal, but we can live with it.

Nearly there….our final hurdle was how to record the bass and Alan’s vocals. Alan also has a micrphone but his computer has no inputs. In “normal” times I would take my laptop and mixer round, we could take a direct line from his bass and also a microphone on the speaker and that would be the job done. But then if it was normal times we would have been with Dave at the Fishtank doing it all in 3 hours rather than creating snippets of songs and sending them across the internet to each other! So we tried an experiment.

Alan plugged some heaphones in with the existing drums and guitar, set up his trusty iphone in front of the bass speaker in the garage, hit record and blasted away. And it worked! Well, sort of. Cos, ya see, these smartphones are really clever and when you are recording something too loud, so that it doesn’t distort, it reduces the volume. Which meant the first half a second of each song was massively loud, then over the next 2 seconds got progressively quieter until it reached a constant level.

We used the same technique for Alan’s vocals. Except to cut out the echo and bounce, he created a wall of pillows to soak up the noise. We had the same problem as with the bass. LOUD AS FUCK at the start and then settling down to normal a few seconds in.

I tried using a compressor and a limiter but they took a lot of the life out of the recording.There was only one thing for it. The digital equivalent of getting out the scissors and sticky tape. I manually went through the first few seconds of each song (or when there was a break!) splitting it up and then reducing volumes until everything was roughly okay.

And there we had it. Except I had put some of the vocals in the wrong place, but once we had that ironed out, and with about 4 rounds of sending songs backwards and forwards to get the sound right, we produced the demo you are now able to hear.

This demo is nowhere near the quality that Dave has done for us in the past, so we will make a trip back to the Fishtank to do these songs “proper”” but I have heard worse released on vinyl (I’m personally thinking of labels like Touch and Go!). It’s urgent (that will be the sound of us all shitting ourselves as we hit record and quickly pick up a plectrum or drumstick). It’s raw (that will be the limitations of low tech recording somehow working in our favour). We hope that these songs will ensure people stay interested in Abrazos so when we get back to gigs and records we aren’t forgotten. For us it means we will have something to help our ancient brains remember what our own songs sound like, and also depsite a few ball aches, it has been fun. It’s helped us stay creative and positive among a period of boredom and groundhog day repetition. It’s kept us connected. And for me it has kept me motivated when a work only existence could have put me into a pit of depression.

So what was the point of this ramble? I’ve compressed hours of staring at a computer, hours of Tony hitting a snare in a million different ways and the frustrations of Alan trying to get a good recording level on a mobile phone into 3 sides of A4 just to convince you that it’s possible. If you want something bad enough you can make it happen. It’s worth giving it a try! Even if you have to use a mobile phone instead of proper microphones you can still create something listenable (we think). Isn’t that what the DIY spirit is about?