Wow! What a week and its not even Wednesday yet! Been having lots of fun testing out and recording with all this shiny new gear! I pwomise there will be photos of the new studio as soon as I can convince somone to come and take some professional shots.

I am over the moon with the sound quality we are achieving here now. It is such a step up from my previous work that I am tempted to re record the songs uploaded on the site but I know that would not be a practical and effective use of my time! I am however coming around to the idea of doing another EP now that I have 5 solid songs to record. Now that the studio is well on its way to being sorted I know I can rely on the equipment to accurately capture what the musicians are doing on my records! It’s an exciting time - in order to keep a unifed sound I am going to speak with the session musicians I work with on a regular basis and see if it would be possible to spend a month in here tracking another 5 track EP. It will be a hell of a task but I KNOW that we can do it. I feel that this way, I won’t keep trickling songs onto the site as they are written with varying degrees of sonic quality but instead, can upload material which has a level of professionalism and coherency which was previously unheard of (notwithstanding the Soundhouse sessions).

In other news I am in the process of booking festivals/competitions for next year. We are already on the roster for Surface Unseen/Unsigned festival due to play on the 17th March 2009. It should be a cracking show and I will be pushing tickets on all you people over the coming weeks…lucky you!

Now that things are moving along nicely the site will also be updated more frequently. As ever be patient guys!

T

Work is progressing nicely now with the new control room.  We are about 85% of the way there having fitted the custom built work surface along with most of the new gear.  I originally intended for a Focusrite to go in there however I managed to grab something far superior off ebay for next to half it’s retail value.  Go me!  We will now be using an RME Fireface 800 at the heart of the studio which just sounds fantastic.  I plan to buy an Audient ASP008 8 channel preamp to for tracking drums but money is quickly running out after my mega spend spree!  There are just a few more items I need to complete this upgrade and unfortunately they are not cheap:

•  Audient ASP008
• Mackie Control Universal Pro

Still, whilst I wait for money/gear I have been writing a tribute song to my recently deceased friend James Hill.  Although I tried to be optimistic, I think most who listen to this track will find it quite haunting - this was not necessarily my intention but I cannot kid myself into thinking losing a close friend is anything but distressing.  However, I tend to show my emotions in my songs than I do in day to day life so it is a good outlet for me and, more importantly, “Your Song” is a rememberance of him and an expression of how much he will be missed.

One of my closest friends from my childhood/teenage years, James Hill sadly passed away in the line of duty last week.  Words cannot begin describe the man that he was, is and always will be - a true, honest and kind close friend of mine.  Lad - you will be greatly missed.  To remember him and his life I am currently writing a song which I aim to record in the coming weeks.  It deeply saddens me to hear of this tragedy and my thoughts are with his family and his soon to be wife, Anastasia Newman.

Things have been relatively quiet here whilst I get ready to have a major overhaul on my recording studio.  My drummer friend Pete has kindly agreed to build a custom work station for my control room (thus maximising the space in there) so that we can start tracking again.  I am also going to enlist the help of Steven Price over @ Grub (which, by the way, is a fantastic little venue in East Grinstead which I highly recommend checking out some time!) to sort out the marketing for our studio.

No studio overhaul would be complete without the addition of some nice new gear.  Gone is the analogue mixer <sniff> but expect to see the following here very soon:

• Focusrite Octopre w/Digital option
• Mackie Control Universal Pro w/Extenders & C4
• Stand mounting for Genelec monitoring
• Custom built work surface courtesy of Pete

I have been wanting to do this for a while now but money was always going to be an issue!  The big idea was to minimise the amount of A/D & D/A conversion in the studio to keep the integrity of the audio signal/path intact.  To do this, we had to cut out the middle man, and in this case, it was the Soundcraft mixer.  Despite my love for the sonic qualities of this mixer (the punch, depth and wide stereo field) I just couldn’t justify keeping it in the age of digital recording.  My system will be moving entirely into the digital realm now and to accomodate this, some serious control surfaces will be needed, hence the Mackies.  Likewise, there will only be one stage of conversion for recorded audio once this upgrade is complete and that task falls in the lap of the Focusrite Octopre.  I have it on very good authority that the converters sound fantastic on these units so it will feed my 2xMOTU 828MKIIs digitally (via lightpipe) to hopefully take recording here that little bit closer to the professional realm…thats the goal at least!  Let’s hope that our aim is true!

BIG thankyou to those of you who came along to see us @ The Bedford last week.  We all had a cracking night and I do hope we have another opportunity to play there again.  What really struck me personally was the level of professionalism - not just from the venue, but from the other fantastically talented up and coming artists!

On a side note, there was a minor error for the gig @ Grub in EAST GRINSTEAD not EPSOM on the gigs page.  This has now been rectified!

Progress is slow at the moment due to a major overhaul of my studio and a man down (bass playing Jon has gone to Italy-lucky boy!) but the final mix of Drowning In Dreams is coming along nicely now.  We re-recorded some parts which I was not happy with (namely the acoustic/electric guitars) and although I should be perhaps spending more time writing new material, anyone who knows me knows that I am a ridiculous perfectionist.  Afterall, once its mixed - thats it!

Tom Hughes Band will be live in concert again on Sunday the 30th August @ The Priory Pub’s acoustic night.  This lively venue in Reigate is making quite a name for itself on the local scene and I know I speak for the whole of the band when I say that we are very priveleged to be involved!  You can catch us at 9pm that Sunday and then later in the week @ The Bedford, London.

The Cellmates (off-shoot of local band The Gutterhearts) will be performing live in concert at the Red Cross pub in Reigate on Saturday the 15th August.  This is a special showcase including half of the Tom Hughes Band supporting Paul Webb (plus special guests) as part of a super group known as “The Cellmates”.  More details to follow very sooon…

Tom Hughes Band will be performing live @ The Bedford on Wednesday 2nd September.  I am thrilled to be playing at this venue as it has been a personal goal of mine for a long time now!  A mass email will be going out soon to thefanclub providing more details.  If you are interested in joining the mailing list simply send an email titled “join” to info@tomhughesmusic.com.  Look forward to seeing you all there on the 2nd!

Had a blast a Refest. Thanks to all of you who came down to see us I know we all had a great time. Was very impressed at the level of the artists/bands who played - It’s amazing to think there is so much talent out there and centered around the Reigate/Redhill area. Hopefully I can convince some of these unsuspecting victims to come and record here at Tom Hughes Studios…their careers will never be quite the same again!!!

Have had some technical issues with the Drowing In Dreams mix in that whilst trying to import it into the mastering computer running Cubase 5, I have been experiencing lots of background hiss/noise. Unfortunately, as my desk does not offer balanced outputs I am going to have to invest in some uber cables to make sure the signal to noise ratio is as good as it possibly can be. I used to mix straight to an external Tascam CD-Writer but am trying to uphold the integrity of the sonic quality of the mix for mastering. By this, I mean that I would like to keep the any conversion to a minimum and hence keep the mix at its original sample rate of 96kHz. Apologies to those of you who have no idea what any of this means (I’m sure you are just hearing white noise in your heads right now!) but just bear with me here and expect the overall production quality to increase greatly with this track (and beyond). I might even go back and remix and master all of our previous recordings here to push the overall production level up although at this stage, it is probably more important to focus on the writing both by myself and with the band!

Anyhow guys stay tuned as I am hard at work on all of this and in the process of booking more gigs for the band!

The first ‘Drowning In Dreams’ mix is only a matter of days away now.  I have been working tirelessly to try and finish this song.  The biggest challenge for this track in particular was the vocals and the guitars.  The former required a couple of different approaches involving reworking some of the existing diction/melodic flow of the lines.  For the latter, some electric overdubs combined with the distinct sound of the Taylor T5 has rectified a ‘thin’ guitar presence in the song which was lacking attack.  As ‘Drowning In Dreams’ has a very particular groove to it, I felt it was important that I get these things right first time without having to go back into the studio to rework instrumentation that was not working.  Be patient and the mix will be uploaded soon!