As every Tom, Dick and Harry Styles saturates the market with the same old garbage we hear on commercial radio day in and day out it’s a pleasant surprise to see someone taking a novel approach.
We’re always keen to support local musicians in their creative endeavours and Jeremy de Tolly, he of the Dirty Skirts fame, has taken a rather unique approach to the recording process of his band Original Swimming Party’s new three-track EP titled ‘wavs’.
Most of the EP was recorded at the RedBull Studios in Cape Town and the band set a couple of ground rules to keep things really interesting. Here’s de Tolly:
Rule # 1
No computers. No computer based FX, no computer based synthesisers, etc. We only used the computer for recording and editing the actual audio (because tape is expensive!!). Fortunately RedBull have some great analogue synthesizers we could use and we ended up using pretty much the Korg MS-20 and the Roland Juno-106 for almost everything, drums included. We also, of course, recorded live guitar, live vox and some live percussion.
Where this rule got exciting was not being able to use digital reverbs so in order to create a ‘space’ we recorded some vocals in my stairwell and some French horn in my garage.
Rule # 2
Use as many chords as possible, and use each chord in only one section per song. It worked out as 8 different basic Major or Minor chords per song then adding 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, etc. we ended up with about 96 different chords between the 3 songs.
Now for the really cool bit – you can listen to the EP ‘wavs’ free of charge on either Soundcloud or Band Camp, keeping up to date with the latest from the band on their Twitter or Facebook account.
Good work Jeremy and the crew, we applaud your creativity and look forward to more good things coming our way from Original Swimming Party.
