TagTiny Union

Songwriting on the West Coast

Last week, me and the rest of Tiny Union rented a car and drove out to the west coast of Sweden. We stayed at Bella’s parents’ place on the island of Orust, and used her dad’s newly built studio as our base. We had a great time there and wrote five or six new songs in three days. Bella unfortunately had a terribly cold the whole time there, which eventually spread to Gustav and myself…so I’m trying to recover from that as I write this.

Next week I will wrap up the process of producing music for the Nobel Creations exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. The music is pretty much finished by now, so what I have left to do now is to cut it up into smaller chunks of audio, sort of disassembling the puzzle if you will, export those files and then focus on getting the programming right so that everything plays the way it’s supposed to. My teacher and super hero programmer Hans Lindetorp at KMH has put in a lot of work creating the framework and the code that controls the music, and he will help me get the last bit right. As I’ve mentioned before, the exhibition will open for the public on the 5th of December.

There will be a release party and concert for the debut Jean and the Mean machine album (mixed and mastered by me) on Tuesday in Stockholm. Check out the Facebook event for more info.

Weekly round-up

The gig with Tiny Union last Wednesday night went really well! The venue (Landet) was pretty much packed with people and we got a lot of nice comments from the audience post-gig, which was nice! The band that played after us, Brödet, were really good, so it was nice to catch their gig as well. At the moment we’re looking for a new rehearsal space, and once that is sorted, we’ll get on with the songwriting and hopefully book a few more gigs!

I recorded guitarist Vitor Celestino and drummer/percussionist Neto Oliveira again last Thursday in KMH’s Studio 2. This time around they brought Guto Lucena, who played flute and soprano saxophone. We recorded live takes of two Brazilian songs with everyone playing in the same room together.

Last night I went to see Jonatan Larson, who plays drums on the upcoming Sagan Om Alltings Förträfflighet album, play with The Royal Concept at Debaser Medis. They played an absolute killer show, I was actually quite blown away by their energy, this being the first time I saw them live.

Studio work & Tiny Union debut gig

I engineered two drum recording sessions this week in KMH‘s Studio 2. The first one was with drummer Jonathan Lundberg for two ballads off jazz/fusion bassist Johannes Zetterberg‘s upcoming third solo album. The second one was with Brazilian drummer Neto Oliveira, who played with guitar virtuoso Vitor Celestino. I had Vitor playing his seven string acoustic guitar right next to me in the control room, which was a pretty amazing experience for an old failed classical guitarist as myself.

Tiny Union will play our first gig next week on Wednesday, 17 September. The venue is Landet, Telefonplan (Stockholm). There’s a Facebook event for the gig, and there will be another band, Brödet, playing as well as a couple of DJ’s from Heaven Up Here spinning records!

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.