In The Studio: Dutch Uncles

Reuniting with producer Brendan Williams, who worked with them on their previous album, 2011's Cadenza, Dutch Uncles headed to fully residential recording studio, Giant Wafer in mid-Wales, late last year to record their next album, Out Of Touch In The Wild.

“Brendan was involved in the writing process as well,” bass player and the band's principal composer, Robin Richards explains. “It was good having that sixth ear that we trusted. I tend to write music first on piano or on a guitar and then print it out as sheet music, so there's a form of a song before we've even played it and I suppose that's quite an unusual way to work, but then as a group we sort of mould it into the song that it can be. Not everything was finished when we went in to record, but we had a direction and it was more a case of filling in the gaps when we got there, I think.”

Giant Wafer is based around a Speck Electronics Lilo 24-channel console going into ProTools HD, with the recording chain flowing through 24 channels of classic Neve and API preamps complementing the studio's collection of industry standard microphones. For the analogue purists they have a beautiful fully refurbished 3M M23 1” eight-track tape machine built in 1966. “We used the studio as more of another instrument. With Cadenza, the recording process was so fragmented; this time we knew the time that we had allocated there and we researched the studio that we thought had all the right instruments and if not, then we rented. There's lots of studio composition, lots of times where we sat around and just broke things apart and put things back together again, and just used what was there and so in that sense, the studio has a kind of character on the record. It wasn't so much console-based – we weren't doing any mixing there or anything. It was mainly kind of DAW-based and everything was kind of 'done in the box' until we were there. They just had a lot of great preamps – API and Neve stuff – and great stuff for vocals as well, like Pultec EQs and really good compression stuff. So there wasn't that much done on the desk – the desk was more just for monitoring really. It was more the environment of the control room that allowed us to all fit in there and contribute when we were working. The instrumentation dictated the way it was going to go. Whatever felt natural for each piece, whether it be a marimba and a vibraphone, or strings or more synths, we'd just place that in and then worked around that. We knew from the start we wanted to have strings, tuned percussion. That instantly gave it more of a distinct sound than the previous album had. We did about 90 per cent of the music and about 50 or 60 per cent of the vocals there, all the important bits that needed a bit of ambience. We had two good rooms in there, one that was a bit lively and one that was completely dead. But it did take us another five months after leaving the studio to finish the rest of the album.”

The rest of the recording period was spent in their own recording/rehearsal studio in Manchester with the final mixing and mastering done at Edwin Street Recording Studio, which is run by Phil Bulleyment, who co-produced, mixed and mastered the album. “He's basically mixed everything that we've ever done,” Richards points out. The high spec recording studio, which also features a production suite for post-production and learning, includes a Toft ATB24 24 Channel console, and industry standard ProTools 9 MOTU 24 i/o Core System. “He's also our live engineer as well – it's pretty good to have the guy who mixed the album mixing our live sound as well, getting it as close as possible to the studio sound.” Reproducing those sounds live, Dutch Uncles are sampling some parts of the album using an Akai MPC1000 Sampling Production Station, as well as an electric marimba from the US, a MalletKat from Alternate Mode – “a really fancy MIDI controller” as Richards describes it, “but it's quite aesthetically pleasing as well.”