Today seemed like a good day to sing, so I sang, then Olivia sang and then I sang again. It’s a privilege to be in the studio spending the day singing. I’m sure that singing is good for your health and you don’t need to have Colin Blunstone’s beautiful voice to enjoy singing. It’s like playing the guitar, you don’t have to be a virtuoso to enjoy playing, so I suggest that everyone starts playing the guitar and singing from today, if for no other reason than to stay alive. Having said that Salim told me that he’d recently seen a crazy statistic – 120,000 songs are released every day. Perhaps this simply means that people love singing, and creating and what could be wrong with that? The problem is how do you get listeners to pick you out.

We did another studio trick today. I’d played bass on a song, the part was good but it sounded a bit ‘plonky’. I’m not sure if that tells you much, but I suggested that we should re-amp it. This means taking the direct input signal and running it back out into the live room into an amp. We then mic up the amp and record the bass again. We then play it back either blending the direct signal with the re-amped signal or just using the direct signal in order to get a more appropriate sound for the track. The reason we had to do this was that when Tess came in to record the cello parts it made the bass sound ‘plonky’ so we had to address the tone and where the bass sat in the track in relation to the cello.

Jason came in later in the day to set up drums for the imminent arrival of sessioneer NJ Brian who is starting album two before album one is mixed, he’s just so prolific. We try to have a setup evening before the artist arrives. We get the drums placed where we want them in the live room, we get the sounds we want, we prepare the computer, adding the demos for reference or to play to. We draw up the whiteboard so we can see what needs to be done and we try and get an early night before the project starts, this one will be a straight ten days of at least 12-hour days.

Congrats to Luton Town who find themselves in the Premiership along with Burnley and Sheffield United. Fingers crossed for Everton, Leicester, and Leeds, two of which will join Southhampton in the drop. Boydie’s Plymouth Argyle topped League One and Dortmund blew it in Germany to hand the title to Bayern – again. FA Cup and Champions League finals will determine if Man City can do the treble. May the best team win.

Music today has been the Fabulous Poodles (1977) and Unsuitable because today I met Bob Suffolk who played keys in the band and now lives in Dallas and designs studios (I bought the album when it came out). He showed up today to discuss some ideas with Salim and Sarah for the studio. He showed up in a 1988 Bentley, see the pic on Instagram. This, their second album, was produced by The Who’s John Entwistle who also plays on the album.

Music Of The Daze