TagSOAF

Back to work

I came back to the studio a couple of weeks ago after three weeks’ holiday. I’ve been working on the Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet album, which needed a few more mix tweaks. I mastered the album last week, and now I will leave it for a few days before checking if I need to do some additional tweaks.

The Jean and the Mean Machine album will also be mastered shortly, and it will be released sometime later this year.

Mixing & recording

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks working on the mixes for the Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet album and the Jean and the Mean Machine album. I did some additional acoustic guitar recording on the last track of the former album last week. Both albums are now getting close to finished. I am meeting Johannes Jacobsson, who’s producing the Jean and the Mean Machine album, next week to make some final mix tweaks before mastering.

Today I mixed a jazz quartet recording that I engineered earlier this week. The quartet consisted of four fine musicians: Tom Eddye Nordén on bass, Rasmus Blixt on drums, Johan Christoffersson on alto saxophone and Filip Ekestubbe on piano. The repertoire was a mix of jazz standards and original compositions. It was apparently the first time these four guys played together and it sounded great! Hopefully some of the cuts from this session will make it onto SoundCloud eventually. I’ll keep you posted.

To wrap this up, here’s a brand new video featuring a beautiful song that I mixed recently:

Espan Festive – “Colorblind” on YouTube

 

Graduation

I graduated from the Bachelor of Arts degree program in music and media production at KMH (Royal College of Music in Stockholm) yesterday! This means my first three years at KMH have come to and end. I will be back however after the summer to begin studying for a Master of Arts degree along with three of my classmates from the bachelor program.

Day:Dream was a very successful event and we managed to pack the venue with an enthusiastic crowd. People whom we spoke to after the show said they appreciated the smooth transitions between the different parts of the show, enhanced by video and audio. It was an interesting and exhausting experience to make everything work on a tight schedule, but I think we pulled it off in the end.

I will spend the summer working on four new albums and an EP and I am very excited to finally have the time to do this! The last few days I’ve revisited the mixes of the Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet album, which I hope will be finished within the next couple of weeks. It’s also time to put the final touches to the Jean and the Mean Machine debut album, which has been on hold for the past few months due to different circumstances. After that I will get to work on the Century Of Ecstasy album. The last bit means I will record some new material, and also re-record some old stuff that I’m not pleased with.

To wrap this up, here’s a treat, a video from Christoffer Karlsson’s gig at the Dubliner in Stockholm on May 6th, with me on the bass:

Christoffer Karlsson – Talk To Me on YouTube

Day:Dream premiere

Tonight’s the night for Day:Dream, a multimedia show featuring myself and ten of my fellow students at KMH (Royal College of Music in Stockholm.) The show features videos, music (both live and pre-recorded material, and any combination of the two), dance and interactivity. We have worked collaboratively with all parts of the show on and off now for the past few months. I will, among other things, perform a rearranged version of “Dötid”, from the upcoming Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet debut album. Tonight’s show at Teater Pero will be the only chance to experience Day:Dream live.

Biking the Archipelago Ad

I co-produced and mixed the song “Better With You” together with Bella Sohlberg for an ad for Södra Bohuslän Turism titled “Biking the Archipelago”. The song was written by Bella Sohlberg and features vocals by her and her father, Robert “Biggles” Sohlberg. Bella also played acoustic guitars on the recording. I played electric guitars, bass and piano and Johan Salomonsson played drums.

“Biking the Archipelago” Ad on YouTube

I’ve been working on the mixes for the Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet record the last few days, moving swiftly from song to song. I’m enjoying the process of having several songs to work on simultaneously, and I think the end result will benefit from that. This week and the next I’m also busy rehearsing with guitarist/songwriter Hugo Lundgren’s project. We’re going to start recording next Wednesday, on my 28th birthday, in one of Stockholm’s finest recording studios. We plan to cut the basic tracks (drums, bass and guitar) live without a click track to keep things as organic as possible.

Mixing SOAF

I spent the last week and a half mixing my way through the Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet record. At this point I’m a little past halfway through it, although I’m trying to work quickly and save the details for later. I recorded some synth overdubs too, and some additional background vocals for a track called “Ta ett kliv”.

Last night I was in the studio with Bella Sohlberg and drummer Johan Salomonsson to record basic tracks for a demo of a new song of Bella’s called “Julian”. She has written this song for her Swedish pop project Fedra. I played bass and Bella played an electric piano while we cut the drums and bass live. Afterwards she replaced the electric piano with an acoustic upright piano, which sounded fantastic through a pair of brand new Schoeps Colette mics I wish were mine… We used the same mics for drum overheads too and I think they did a pretty good job there as well.

Weekly round-up

Just a quick post to summarize this week’s efforts. This week was pretty much the same as last week, mixing, rehearsing and writing songs. Finished a batch of new mixes for Jean and the Mean Machine, and continued to work on the S.O.A.F. record. I have decided now to finish the whole record before putting anything out. I think it will be a lot more fun to work that way, rather than spending weeks just working on one or two tracks. It’s nice to be able to compare different mixes of different tracks, too. Bella and Gustav and I wrote some pretty cool songs this week, and I’ve started thinking about what my live rig should be like. Right now I’m thinking a Fender Bass VI…but I don’t have one of those, so that means I’d have to buy one…hmm, we’ll see. That’s not the only instrument I have in mind; the latest versions of Logic and MainStage allow for some pretty cool experimentation. I’m thinking that with a Bass VI and a MIDI keyboard, plugged into a computer, I could have a lot of fun.