The making of ‘To Behold’

Well this is a story that goes back to spring 2009, I was working on a few ideas and I came up with the basic riff and bass line, I added some keys and just jammed over it.
After the initial recording I took it home to work on and I did some work on the drum programming, then it sat for a good 6 months.
In the meantime I had written a chorus for it and some lyrics and I started playing it live at my solo gigs that I have been doing and in the spring I worked on the band recording put in the choruses and had a structure there.
I then went to my friend Roger O’Donnell’s house and asked him if he wouldn’t mind recording some Moog on it for me. His initial solos were great but he was using his trademark muted sound, and after much nagging I got him to open up the filters a but to make it sound a bit more rock, and what he recorded to my ears was amazing, exactly what I wanted. He did 3 takes and I edited some of it together to give some layers.

This song then sat fallow for a bit longer.
I had performed some embryonic versions live with my old band, and during this process Niall had worked out some more interesting bass lines to the ones that I had recorded on the original demo so we recorded the bass very much in an as live situation where we played guitar and bass together as if it were live, we did 3 takes of the bass and cut the best bits together. We took a DI out of an Ampeg SVT 3 and recorded it straight in and added a limiter. There was an EHX compressor in the fx chain.
The vocals were recorded in my flat using an electric condenser mic with a pop shield and no pets around! The last thing was the guitars. Now I re recorded all the guitar parts from the demo, the Acoustic is my Yamaha where I recorded the sound from the internal piclup to one channel and I also recorded the guitar at the same time using an electric condenser microphone, I used separate condenser mics and panned the guitars 75% L and R (Mic was left and transducer right I think!!).
The clean electric guitars were my Charvel 375 going through a Marshall DRP1 direct recording pre amp into the mixer then into the computer, all effects were added from plug ins. And the Lead guitar was done the same with the exception of also going through an original 70s EHX Big Muff pedal.

And there you go!

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