... continued
br> This first evening was a free night, so we enjoyed a beer on the square, then wandered around for several hours, while John tried to find a restaurant he'd been in seventeen years earlier when conducting a film score. In the end we did find it, and I had the local delicacy - stewed duck with dumplings. We retired back to our hotel for the night, resisiting the invitations of the local ladies of some entertainment. Even Gavin, drum-muffin extraordinaire.

Did I mention that we were here to do some work? We convened the next morning for breakfast - assorted Czech sausages and dumplings amongst the buffet selection. You'll know from previous newsletters that food plays a very important part in Caledon business. We headed out to the famed Smecky recording studio, barely a minute's walk from the hotel, past the now empty strip-club windows. Can't have any distractions now.

The first morning was spent putting parts on stands and meeting the engineer, Jan, and the fixer, James Fitzpatrick, resident Irishman about town. Setting up takes a whole session for such a date. After midday the orchestra started strolling in. The way the sessions worked was that we would begin with the full orchestra on the first day and then thin out, keeping costs down.

The schedule was to record one song an hour, and we kicked of with Highland Cathedral. 'Oh, what a glorious...noise! Rich, Warm-reekin'... Well, that was during the mid-session breaks, when the whole orchestra seemed to light up for a smoke, and fog filled the studio. Can't be good for the mics. The players were all given headphones, to listening to the already recorded vocal tracks that we were trying to 'post-sync' to. Some chose not to use them. It was clear that the task was going to be an hard one. The original vocal tracks were recorded live, and most were used on the 'blue' album; there was no 'clicktrack' to tie the tempo down to.

Neil had envisaged such a problem. Orchestras play at their own internal pace, and it's a very musical way of doing it for them. Getting sixty players to play in time to a recording which doesn't keep metronomically steady was difficult so, within each hour we recorded several takes, some as close to the 'track' as possible, and some 'wild', without the vocal tracks running. There were other issues too. I was playing the studio's Petrof concert grand, but screened off behind the conductor's back, so I couldn't see him properly. Gavin was further away, in another room, working entierly on 'cans' [headphones] and watching live images of John on a black and white television so old that it could have been the moon landings on the screen. In fact, the drum set that the studio provided looked as if it dated from around the same era.

...continued in Prague in the Spring 3