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After working with the guys from Ulysses as their live-sound engineer for a couple of concerts and with Michael Hos performing on the Ixion album Talisman, they asked me to help them out with the recording of their next album ‘Family Portrait’. They were not sure whether to record again in an ‘official’ studio or to try and do everything ‘themselves’. They asked me to help them record the drums and the vocals on the song ‘Family Portrait’ which would serve as a test bed for how we would handle the rest of the project. The drums were recorded in Peter Boer’s rehearsal studio “The Toolshed’. We setup on Friday 1st of June trying to get a convincing drum sound. We tried some different snare-drums, but settled with the drum-kit as was setup by Peter. We did not use Rene van Haaren’s own drum-kit, which is a kit with larger drums, nice for live playing but for recording it is easier to have a ‘smaller sounding kit’, easier to control and you can always make it sound big.
On Saturday 11:00 we started recording the 9 minute song and by 15:00 we were finished and had nice sounding drums on the song and a very, very happy drummer!
The second stage was recording the singing. On the evening of the 11th of June, both Michael Hos and guitarist Sylvester Vogelenzang de Jong came to my humble studio, the former as the singer and the latter as vocal coach. I already had some experience with Michael singing, for a couple of days before we did some Ixion stuff, so we had everything setup pretty fast. And after 2 hours of recording, we had the vocals pinned down, and even had time to do some backing vocals featuring Sylvester. They will do the rest of the recordings themselves, and after having the song mixed by a couple mixing engineers, they will decide what route they will take for the recording of the whole album, but ‘Family Portrait’ should a good test project for that.
Check out their work on: www.ulysses-online.nl
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