Recording w/ Niklas Krig

I started work on a new EP with Niklas Krig last weekend. We spent Friday rehearsing and Saturday recording basic tracks on five songs. Alexander Carlberg played drums, and Niklas laid down acoustic piano and acoustic guitar. I played bass while tracking the drums, and will redo the bass parts later this week. I’m producing this EP with Niklas, and we will do the rest of the production as a long distance collaboration with him working in his home studio in Malmö and me being in Stockholm.

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.

Tiny Union debut live video

After six months of writing songs together, Bella, Gustav and I have named our new band Tiny Union. This video, in which we make our first public appearance, was just released:

Stockholm Sessions Ep. 32: Tiny Union – Your Eyes on Me

We shot this video with Stockholm Sessions earlier this month. We played five songs and I engineered the audio recording. The other songs turned out great as well, and Bella has edited the videos for those, so we might release them sometime in the future!

Live video shoot & gigs

Last week was another terribly busy one. Stockholm Sessions filmed five songs with my soon-to-be-named band with Bella Sohlberg and Gustav Löfstrand. Our performance of the song “Your Eyes On Me” will be released by Stockholm Sessions next Tuesday on YouTube.

After the video shoot, which took place last Friday, I went to Halmstad for a covers gig with Världens Bästa Band at a private event, and then back to Stockholm for a country/pop/blues/funk gig last night with Christoffer Karlsson at The Dubliner. This morning I laid down some bass for Sadia Gaya and now I will start mixing the audio from last week’s video shoot mentioned above. In the midst of everything I’ll try to finish my bachelor’s thesis and, oh yeah, my class at Kungl. Musikhögskolan (Royal College of Music) is working on a multimedia event titled Day:Dream that will feature music, video and a smartphone orchestra. Phew…

Rehearsing…

Had a super busy week after the Easter holidays. I spent most of it rehearsing with Bella Sohlberg and Gustav Löfstrand for our upcoming live video shoot this Friday. We will perform five brand new songs and the guys from Stockholm Sessions will film it for us. We have actually been arranging our songs these last few days, working on the electronic beats and choosing instruments and sounds and trying to figure out what parts we are going to play. It’s gone really well so far and we pretty much know how we’re going to perform four out of five songs, and there’s two more rehearsals to figure out what to do with the last song.

I sat down with Hugo Lundgren a couple of times this week to listen to the takes from our recording session at Riksmixningsverket. There were somewhere around ten takes for each of the four songs that we recorded, and they all differed slightly, partly because we played them live without a click track. We actually tried a few takes with click track as well, but listening back to them now, they seemed to lack a bit of energy and liveliness. There were a few other really good takes though, and Hugo has picked his favorites now and will continue with overdubs of guitars and different keyboard instruments. He’s also planning to record live strings and then we’ll probably try to do the vocals again with singers Bella Sohlberg and  Julia Jonas. They both did such an amazing job performing more than forty takes in one day when we recorded the rhythm tracks, without losing either their voices or their energy.

Recording w/ Hugo

I spent my 28th birthday at Riksmixningsverket, one of Sweden’s finest recording studios, owned by Benny Andersson from ABBA. The session was for guitarist/songwriter Hugo Lundgren’s new project, and the main focus was on getting basic tracks on four songs. Hugo and I also had the company of Alexander Carlberg who played drums and vocalists Bella Sohlberg and Julia Jonas who sang with us. The goal was to get good takes of all of us playing together, so we did quite a lot of takes on all four songs. I played my Bravewood jazz bass through a 1966 Ampeg B15 mic’ed with a vintage U47. That was a killer setup, and everyone liked the bass sound very much. Of course, now I will have to buy a B15 at some point…they’re quite pricey though. The drums sounded fantastic as well. Alex played a vintage Ludwig kit and sound engineer Linn Fijal had put up a nice selection of mics around it. There was an AKG C24 stereo tube mic for the overheads, Coles ribbons as room mics, U47 FET in front of the kick…you get the picture!