Come This Way

"Come This Way" was written and recorded around 2004. 

I love the atmosphere of the song. And it was one of my kitchen recordings. 

They say people love singing in the shower. Well, they should try recording acoustic instruments in the kitchen. Kitchens often have many reflective and hard surfaces and also has a great work bench for equipment.  You can even stand while working there.

As opposed to the recording rooms I use now, which are meticulously measured to have the right "room ratio".

A funny thing with artificial recording spaces like a recording room is that, once you start soundproofing it (preventing the sound from escaping the room),  the sound is captured in the room and you need to use a lot of time and money on treating the room acoustically. Or it won't sound any good. Which means that your living room might sound much better than a recording room if you don't do it absolutely right. 

So, you can make a beautiful recording in a typical domestic space. And may find more character in a normal room, however if you want a "Swiss army" kind of room that works pretty well on most types of instruments and music, you'd want a neutral room, and that is a typical recording room. (Very easily explained) 

Personnel:  

Me and the coffee machine

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This is not my kitchen

This however... is our "reverb chamber" with lots of vibe.

You Are Holding Me Back

"You Are Holding Me Back" was originally a mellow, spacious, canon kind of thing. 

It was written in a 6 week period with lots of experimentation by myself.  The year was 2000, around summertime.

I made the loop after some improvisations, sped it up and made a new arrangement onto the loop. The more I worked on "You Are Holding Me Back", it became more funky. 

I love Motown, the production, the musicians, the instruments. I kind of grew up on it as a kid. I have spent much time listening to and trying to emulate the qualities of the clavinet.  And this is one of the songs were I tried to go for that 60-70’s clavinet feel on the guitar. 

I remember we used to push it real hard during shows. I cranked two amps up on full for the ending.  To be able to play the arrangement and all the notes live, I used a Gibson double necked guitar and played each string separately on the 12 string neck 

In fact, I was so fascinated by the twin neck guitar that it almost became a problem. I started to use it on 90 percent of the live material. It was a heavy guitar to drag around, and I had to carry it about 8 km to and from rehearsals.  And we rehearsed 5 hours, 5 days a week at the very least. 

I remember lying on the couch to the very moment of the gig because of the back and shoulder pains caused by this guitar. :)

Additional musicians:

Geir Arne Ose: drums.

Geir Satre performing with his beloved double-neck at Vaskeriet, Kristiansand, (2002)

Image source: NRK