This week, Orange Goblin frontman Ben Ward reveals that tracking for the band’s new album (no title revealed yet) is complete and that mixing has begun. As such, it’s sad to say, but the series of studio updates is coming to a close. One more next week, and then we’ll actually have to sit and wait for the record to come out next March, which suddenly feels a really long time away.

Thanks once again to Ward for sending in these updates and photos. If you’ve missed past installments, you can find them here. Orange Goblin is Ward, guitarist Joe Hoare, bassist Martyn Millard and drummer Chris Turner. The new album is being produced by Jaime Dodd at The Animal Farm studio in South London. Here’s the latest:

Orange Goblin – Album Recording – Week 5

OK, so these blogs are getting harder and harder to write as week by week we get less and less to do and there is more and more sitting around whilst Jamie [Dodd, engineer] starts setting up mixes. So this week I’m gonna take you back to last Tuesday when I sent the recorded files off to Craig Riggs from Roadsaw at his studio in Boston. We’d all been very keen to have Riggs involved in this album with some backing vocals so when he agreed, we couldn’t wait to hear what he’d done. By Friday evening he’d starting returning the files and I have to say we were all blown away by what he’d done. It sounds great! First thing Saturday morning and Jamie had uploaded all of Riggs’ work into the mix and everything was right with the world! It was just Joe and I at the studio again as Martyn has flown out to Egypt for a two week holiday with his girlfriend and Chris was at home looking after his boys.

Both Joe and I got to work and I finished the last vocal track (“Return to Mars”) and Joe put all the finishing touches to his guitar parts so we were all done tracking!! This led to a mini-celebration involving large amounts of cider, beer and that dreaded pizza again (which isn’t so bad after said amounts of cider!). As we started getting ready for mixing, there was much swearing and shouting at the TV as Liverpool crashed to their first defeat of the season in the football. I think this was all a little bit odd for the photographer that turned up to do some shots for a Terrorizer magazine studio report and the guy from Jagermeister who turned up to interview Joe and I about the recording process so far! Despite this we all went home happy and ready to start recording keyboards first thing on Sunday morning.

Chris was back today but Joe wasn’t around as he had to attend a Christening. We were expecting to get the keyboards down today but unfortunately, Matt, the keyboard player couldn’t make it (he’s coming in to do it next weekend now!), so Chris and I sat around very, very bored whilst Jamie went over and over the same song adjusting snare drums sounds, cymbals, kick drums and all that kind of stuff!! We didn’t hang around too long, preferring to leave it in Jamie’s capable hands. We have one more full weekend of mixing to do next week (and the keyboards) and then it will be complete. I think a week away from these songs will do us all good now as we are bordering on overkill at the moment. So, next week will be the last report and then the process of mastering and preparing the artwork and planning a marketing campaign begins, all leading up to the release of this album in March, 2012!

Ben Ward, 14th September, 2011

Tags: Candlelight, London, Orange Goblin, UK

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 at 10:44 am and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.