The False Dots are in the process of recording a brand new album! We've been busy in the studio for a month or so. I am lucky, I have my own studio so it's free! Well sort of. We do it in down time, when no one else is in. We can take our time and get things right. The advent of modern technology such as Logic X, iMac's and plug ins, mean that we can make albums that you'd have to have paid £1,000 to rent Abbey Road to make when The False Dots started. If you make a mistake on your part, it is dead simple to just drop in a new bit and edit it. How things have changed.
When The False Dots made our first demo in 1980, we saved up for months. It cost £160, which was a small fortune. That bought us sixteen hours. We divided that into a whole day to do tracks, a half day for overdubs and a half day for mixing. Our first demo was three tracks, Not all she seems, Ride and Her Little World. We were very tight as a band, but we were technically inexperienced. The band consisted of myself on guitar and Pete Conway on bass and vocals, who'd been playing a year or so, Paul Hircombe who was 14 but had been playing for 2-3 years, had had guitar lessons and was pretty good and Dav Davies who was a few years older on Drums and was excellent.
We recorded the backing tracks in the caretakers cottage at Bunns Lane Works, it was the first recording at Mill Hill Music Complex. We used Alan Warner of The Foundations mobile rig. It was an eight track set up. This meant that you could record up to eight different things on it and mix them. The Drums were recorded in stereo, My guitar, Pauls guitar and Petes bass were a track each. We double tracked Pete's vocals. This left a track spare. On Not All She seems and Ride I put an acoustic guitar and on Her Little World a horrible Fuzz guitar. If you made a mistak, usually you had to do the whole thing again. Once the drums were mixed into Stereo, there was no adjustment. You could 'drop in' bits, but it was fiddly. When the tracks had been recorded, they were mixed. This involved getting the levels right and adding a bit of echo. You could also bounce tracks together, which merged them, but you lost a bit of quality and couldn't edit them easily after. Sometime you'd use spare bits of tracks (when the singer wasn't singing), for some percussion etc. It was all very time consuming. Each track had to be checked continually for tape drop outs etc. It never happened to us, but I knew bands who spent days recording, only for tapes to shred and the whole thing be lost.
For us though, it was really exciting. When we heard the tracks, we were gobsmacked. We sounded like a real band. The double tracking of Pete's vocals and the acoustic guitar made us sound like the bastard offspring of the Velvet Underground. Alan Warner was really encouraging and I think he liked the energy we had and also the way we experimented and were not satisfied with something that we didn't like. When we got the demo mixed, it was onto cassettes. We thought we'd storm the world. Sadly, we learned that it isn't that easy. The world wasn't really ready for the bastard offspring of the Velvet Underground quite yet. We played it to a few record labels, who didn't know what to make of it. We were rejected for being too poppy by some and too punky by others. In the end, the result was the same. We didn't get a deal. It didn't deter us. I loved recording and still do. It openened my eyes to what was possible and I'll always love Alan to death for enthusing us.
If you want to hear our new album played live, come down to The Dublin Castle on Sunday 25th at 2pm. It will be fun. We've got better!
The False Dots next gig
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