dive dive are recording their third album

a) Ben Nigel and Tarrant have once again been trapped in a tour bus with Frank Turner for 12 weeks.
b) then we were trapped in Los Angeles by an Icelandic Volcano.
c) now we are home and Jet Lagged.
d) the album is still finished. It hasn't become un-finished somehow while we've been away. This is good.
e) we are searching for a way to put it out that will give it a chance of being heard by the widest audience possible.
f) we are holding off emailing the list until we have more concrete news.
e) is for experience.

Album finished. Tarrant Ben and Nigel kidnapped by Frank Turner again. Trying to organise public dissemination of album. End communication.

We're.......yup......I think we're mixing.

We mentioned it before, but in case it passed any of you by there a couple of our rare gigs this week.

Tuesday 30 June - The Boiler Room - Guildford - Supporting Hold Your Horse Is
Tickets from WeGotTickets.com - over 18s only - 13 STOKEFIELDS, GUILDFORD, SURREY GU1 4LS

Wednesday 1 July - Bullingdon Arms - Oxford - Headline
Tickets from SeeTickets.com - over 18s only - Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1UE

The album is slowly working its way towards completion. But surely.

Goodbye leggy blonde

Bullet points:
- recorded an album with Frank Turner
- Ben re-amped bass guitars
- Jamie has done some of the lead vocals
- we have gigs coming up at the end of June
- Nigel wrote this
- hopefully Ben will come back with more details

Finished a four night sold out run supporting Frank Turner in Oxford last night. Since ol' beardy balls had sold out all the shows by himself we were happy to do all new songs, bringing out almost everything for an airing over the week except Pod People and Why Are You Back Again. Two sets a night was tiring, but satisfying.

Unlikely to do more on the album tracks over the next couple of weeks - more rehearsals with FT this week, and then a week in a studio laying down backing tracks for his new album - but after that we should have a little clear time to re-amp and vocalise the hell out of them. The rough mixes Ben's done sound pretty great already, especially Indifference that sounds HUGE.

nigel

Thanks should go to Captain Tom of Oxford band Smilex - His guitar tone was once compared to the sound of the Batmobile starting up (Adam West's that is). He's also a qualified electrician and has wired the rehearsal space for light, heat and sound. He was well compensated for his efforts. Thanks Tom!

rehearsal room ready for flooring and the ubiquitous carpet on walls...
please note the child labour.

Not really another day of recording, just an update. We finished the basic tracking, but we've got to finish the building of the studio before we can start re-amping. So we're neck deep in rockwool and plasterboard and nails and screws and swearing. Should be finished within the week, then we can get on with it (in between rehearsing with FT). So there.

Written by Nigel!

A Nigel writes:

Another solid 3 hour session today, and I think we finished everyting. We've left everything set up just in case we review the stuff and decide there's something we want to revisit, but other than that we were so confident we did two tracks that weren't even on our list. So the tracks we hit today were:

'The Point Is': short and fast, this was a track that we rehearsed with me adding some loop pedal stuff to. It was going to be a technical challenge to sort out the live looping stuff, so it was one of two songs we did to click. Our friend Ron came in and tape opped for this one.

'You've Not Heard The Last Of Me': Very Bloc Party / Foals kind of vibes in this one. I'm not totally comfortable drifiting this close to a recognised style, but it's a solid song, so hopefully we'll make it our own throughout the recording process.

'Why Are You Back Again?': Ben and Tarrant went out for a break while me and Jamie did this one, it's a little tricky with some subtle meter changes. Fun to record, me and Jamie getting to feel it a little more than the other hyper-arranged songs.

'Let's Swap Places': Another one to a click, but I think we managed to keep the vibe loose enough. Slow and atmospheric, used my wood snare tuned low for this one.

And that was it for the list. But we were blasting along, so we also did:

'Potential': 45 seconds long, and my tip for album title track.

'Ape Like Me': You might know this one from our myspace The Vorus site, but we thought we'd have a non-acoustic crack at it.

So that's (hopefully) the basic tracks recorded. Vocals, re-amping and overdubs to follow. We'll keep you updated, although the next few days are going to be taken up really sorting out the rehearsal space. We're all expecting a few unhealthily long days covered in rockwool.

Ben .: 10:36 .: 26 March .: 2009

Yesterday turned out to be muy productivo, got 4 solid rhythm tracks down in good time, and thankfully it would appear the reamping thing should work well...

Here's the mic list so far:

2x Oktavamod MK-012 : Overheads
Shure SM87 beta : Kick
Neumann TLM103 : under snare
Sennheiser MD504 : Floor Tom (Nige doesn't use any rack toms for DD)
Neumann KM84i : Room/rafters

Bass and our 2 guitars are being DI'ed with link connections running to PODs (urghh) just for monitoring purposes.

The overheads are in the Recorderman position which I like a lot for its simplicity in getting snare and kick centred and in phase.

The 87 on kick is a slightly left field choice, being as its primarily a live vocal condenser, but so far I'm happy as it actually sounds more like Nigel's kick drum than past choices we've used (SM91/ D112/ SolidTube).

I finally finished watching The Wire (5 seasons/2.5 months) a couple of nights ago, which has left me with a gaping hole in my evenings, so, last night I finally got round to finishing 2 reamping boxes made as per Scott Dorsey's instructions. Even better news, given my lack of skill with a soldering iron, was that they both worked straight away!

More tracking later today...

More good recording work at the studio today, but prior to that, so no one can accuse us of being slack, we were continuing building work on our new practice space. You may have seen it in Frank Turner's blog, since he'll be making use of it in his opportunistic way for rehearsals for his new album, but it's for Dive Dive really. Rockwool makes you itch - of this you can be assured.

Then down to the scary house in the woods studio for 3 p.m. Ben reset microphones (we take them down each night to avoid ruining them with condensation) while I got the computer whizzery back up and working, checked the tuning on my kit, and then pulled out a couple of alternative snares for the day. Since Tarrant was yet to arrive we recorded a couple of takes of things with the two different snares and then me and Jamie did the 'Pepsi Challenge' to try and pick a winner. Which turned out to be both during the course of the session anyway.

Tarrant showed up so we probably got playing by 3.30, and then burned through another clutch of songs. 'Alarum' was first because it's the oldest and most familiar track on the record, having been recorded for Mechanical Dog but rejected on grounds of wierd sounding cymbals. Hurm. We would have done it yesterday but I forgot my little tambouriney thing that mounts on my hi-hat stand. As usual, demonstrated above, we took frequent breaks for Tarrant to swear into his Blackberry.

'Wherewithal' was next, which imho is the best of the new stuff. Wierd, very short but somehow perfect in construction, we needed to set up Jamie with a vocal mic for this one since the timing is very elastic, and we cue a lot off him.

Similary for 'Indifference', which is a more straightforward beastie but with some vital vocal cues. Since we didn't wanted his startled dog-yelp coming down the ambient drum mics he was whisper-singing which made for a slightly odd vibe in the headphones.

I think 'Mr 10%' was next, I suggested getting another of the tricky ones out of the way, and this has a jerky rhythmic break going through the middle 8 that took us a long time to figure out. I think it's working now though.

Last for the day was 'Pod People'. I don't know if this is a working title or Jamie has settled on this. Name doesn't have anything to do with the lyrics as far as I can make out, but hey, I'm just the drummer.

I spent a while on my own after everyone else had gone sorting out some monitor mixes so we can check our work, and setting up some ProTools sessions for next time using click tracks (only two songs on the record need them). No work like this for us tomorrow, we're back in on Saturday, hopefully to finish off phase one.

Toodle pip.

Nigel

7:52 p.m.

Just got back from first proper day recording. More technical details if I can find time to blog them later, unless Ben beats me to it. We managed to track four songs today: Damage Control, Collapse From The Hurt, Liar, and Police The Police. I'm going to eat. Let's talk later, yeah?

nigel

It's not so much a studio we're recording in, more a scary tiny house in the middle of nowhere next to a river, very kindly lent by a friend who runs a publishing company. The pictures make it look like something you might find at the climax of Blair Witch Project 3: The Witchening.

The light reflecting off the river in the late afternoon and coming in the windows was fantastic though, much more inspiring than the usual brushed-pine-no-windows studio bunker. And there's mobile reception as well, which makes Tarrant very happy.

We only did a three hour session today, but made very good headway. We're trying to do the album as live as possible (i.e. with everyone playing their parts all together), but to make this technically feasible we're doing something called 're-amping' with the guitars, which means we record them plugged straight into the 'tape machine' (there's a giveaway to my age, but even though there's no tape within a mile of the place I still don't know what else to call it) all clean and horrible sounding, and then after we've got the parts down and recorded we go off elsewhere, run those signals out to amplifiers with microphones in front and re-record that.

"Why bother with all that?" you may sigh exasperatedly. Well, to get a good drum sound you have microphones some distance away from the kit (more about drums and microphones in a moment). If we had guitar and bass amps in the same room blasting away the drum microphones would pick up that ghastly noise and ruin our lovely drum sound. This way we can all stand in the same smallish room looking at each other and still have a triff drum sound.

For vibe we have amp simulators ('Pods') that the guitars play through into our headphones so it still sounds gutsy and rockin'.

Anyone who noticed the pile of stones under the snare drum and thought 'wha?', apparently they reflect the sound back up from the underside of the snare and make it brighter and 'wangier'. Or something. It sounds nice, so we're going with it. The drum micing isn't totally standard this time around. Ben may wish to elucidate more (and unless you're a gearslut it's probably time to go find something interesting to read), but we've got a couple of Oktava pencil condensors over the kit in the 'Recorderman' configuration, our stalwart Sennheiser e605 on the my lovely new Signia floor tom, a Neumann KM84 right up in the rafters of the room, a Shure SM87 Beta on the kick drum and a Neumann TLM103 under the snare. No snare top or standard overheads, we're going for a roomy sound and I think so far it sounds spanking, although the room means we've only been monitoring through Ben's super swanky hi fi headphones. 'Damage Control' is a stomping mid pacer, and features me playing a metal cup along with the rest of the kit (the same metal cup played by the same drummer appeared on outtakes from Jonny Greenwood's 'Body Song' soundtrack, fact fans). 'Liar' is one of my big favourites of the new stuff, poppy, single-ish but in the slightly jerky uncomfortable Dive Dive way. I'm very proud of the drumming - it's not difficult but it's definitely different. 'Collapse From The Hurt' has only just grown out of it's working title of 'Bossa Nova' (which may give you a hint as to how it starts out sounding), and has lyrics about being beaten unconscious by the acting star of Alien and Scandal. (joke). There's a backing vocal at the end that nearly causes me to pass out when we rehearse it, and it was a pleasure to record it today without havin to sing. 'Police The Police' had the working title of 'Police', so it's not fallen very far from that particular tree. It's the second, or possibly third, song of ours that has carried that working title, due to my penchant of ripping off Stuar

Ben .: 11:14 .: 24 March .: 2009

Welcome people, our little anticipated third album is written and ready for recording!

Its been a long time in gestation, and as I'm sure quite a few of you will know 3/4 of us have been fairly busy as the band for a certain beardy person but his pop-folk-radio-friendly stylings leave us wanting a little more noise/chaos/dive dive in our lives...

Today, Nigel and myself are heading to a small boathouse, on stilts, next to a river in the middle of nowhere. Its a setup day, which means that we won't probably get anything *real* recorded, but drum sounds will be got and problems encountered, then solved.

More to come as it happens, quite likely loaded with technical details if its of interest to anyone...

It's 11.13 p.m., got back not long ago from setting things up. Just me and Ben tonight, setting the drumkit at the mysterious house in the middle of nowhere (no pictures of the outside, it was dark by the time we got there. Get some tomorrow maybe), getting the recording gear up and working, setting up microphones, getting sounds. Everyone in tomorrow to play some songs. Tired. Somewhat incoherent. Will let you know more tomorrow.

Nigel