Crash Course Album

Fresh out of high school, Toto Vivian left Australia for London, but it was in Byron Bay a couple of summers ago that he met New Zealander, singer Sasha Carlson, and struck up a musical friendship that saw them back in London learning how to play guitar, write songs and record them in Vivian's Hackney bedroom. Twelve months of experimenting later, they've released their debut album, Comfort.

“A year ago I wouldn't have thought we'd have an album out that's been self-produced and done at home,” a still pleasantly surprised Vivian admits. “Since I moved to London five years ago, I started recording myself and trying to learn how to produce stuff, and also teach myself guitar at the same time, and during those years I've just spent endless hours in my bedroom just messing about with effects. It's a pretty simple setup, really; I've just got Logic Pro on my laptop, a couple of cheap microphones, and it's all done in the computer – no hardware. There's no real secret to it – I guess it's how you listen to it and how you try and create something. For me it's all in the ears – if it sounds good, it's good. Lots of distortion, delay and reverb. I don't worry about all the technical science behind it. I mean it's good to know but sometimes people get too caught up in the science of mixing and recording I think.

“Sasha and I would literally just sit in my room and we'd be bashing it out on the drum machine trying to make it sound as live as possible to play with it. I just used Reason, ReDrum, just kind of like '60s drum samples. It's, like, all Logic Pro plug-ins pretty much. That way we wrote most of the album, pretty much straightaway, before we even had a drummer. And now live, Jake [ex-The Checks drummer Jacob Moore, an old friend of Carlson's, who was flown in from New Zealand a week before the band's first gig] has transcribed all the beats that we wrote and made them his own, which is good.”

Completing the four-piece line-up of Splashh is Englishman Thomas Beal on bass, though again, he isn't on the debut album.

“We just play Fender Stratocasters and actually all the bass was recorded through the guitar – I just dropped the pitch on it… and that's the bass. I think it sounded a little bit more twangier than the actual bass guitar itself. So that's a little technique we used over the year whilst we were recording the album. We just kept dodging all these obstacles,” Vivian laughs, “and just found our way on how to record a bass without having a bass. But it actually turned out working out – I don't know; I guess it's the sound of the album.”

Logic Pro is, of course, a hybrid 32/64 bit digital audio workstation and MIDI sequencer software application originally designed by German software company Emagic, which company Apple bought in 2002, and runs on the Apple Mac OS X platform. The latest update is Logic Pro 9, with built-in library browsers to more easily navigate thousands of instrument and effect settings, Apple Loops and more.

“I guess it's a bit of a cheat really, using all the amp designers and stuff [on Logic Pro] but I guess now it's got me prepared to move forward and experiment in an actual studio – you know, mic'ing up things.”

Recorded, engineered, produced and mixed in Vivian's bedroom, the band then sent the finished product to RAK Studios to be mastered through analogue tape machines “to add a little more warmth to it”.

RAK Recording Studios were originally set up in 1976 by record producer Mickie Most, who converted a Victorian schoolhouse and church hall in London's St John's Wood into a state-of-the-art recording studio complex with full residential facilities. RAK Mastering offers basic, DDP image and online mastering options, the latter launched three years ago, utilising a combination of state of the art and vintage equipment, including analogue gear dating right back to the 1950s.

Splashh released two proper singles – Need It and Vacation – last year in the UK, both of which feature on the album, as well as a very limited edition – 50 copies only – of another song, All I Wanna Do, also on the album, on the cassette-only boutique label Kissability, which “sets out to celebrate the old cassette format whilst also embracing the digital age”.

“We felt that the album had to be this collection of songs that had been written over the past year because that kind of defines the start of Splashh. Now we're experimenting a bit more. With a live rhythm section, the dynamics have widened and playing live – we've been playing live now for eight months – we all sort of get it and even in soundchecks we're jamming out new ideas. It's all very exciting.

After a lightning visit to play Sydney and Melbourne, Splashh are heading back to the UK to support The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park.

“To be honest with you, I thought it was an April Fools' joke,” Vivian admits. “Our manager sent us a text, saying, 'Yeah, we're looking at this Rolling Stones gig' and I thought he must have meant one of the other bands he manages!”