So I’ve decided to write a blog on the making of Mister Fusty’s third album. That difficult third album, even more difficult as I’ve decided to add vocals this time and as I’m discovering it makes things a lot more time consuming!
This blog is not going to be a ‘this is how I did this & did that’ kind of technical discussion. I won’t be going into great detail of how I achieved that ‘wowee wowee’ effect or how made that guitar sound like a tractor. There are other blogs and websites that do that kind of thing far better than I ever could. No, this will be a look into the creative, possibly deranged mind of Mister Fusty and hopefully a few humourous tangents will be found along the way.
First a little background. I’ve made two albums, Honest Blundering and Sparkle Darkly, which were both instrumental. For the third album the reasoning behind adding vocals was that I really wanted to write pop songs. A lot of the music on the previous two albums were pop songs albeit without singing. I could have added vocals then but I had a terrible microphone, which probably cost about £10, and I had no confidence in my voice. Of course I’ve now bought a new microphone (a Samson one, I forget the model, I could go and find out for you but I suspect you don’t really care) and my thinking was that if I spend some money on a mic, than surely I’d have to give singing a go. I was secretly hoping that really it was the cheapo mic that was making my voice sound terrible to my ears and that with a ‘proper’ microphone I’d suddenly be able to sing. It hasn’t really worked out like that. Although a better quality microphone has made me a bit more confident. So vocals are go go go!

The way I’ve always recorded is in small chunks. I’m not like a real musician that books studio time and then goes in for a month or two (or years in some cases). I record at home, (yes, I’m one of those ghastly home recording musicians you read about) which means I can work whenever I have time or dash into the studio (ok, it’s actually a spare bedroom) whenever I have an idea for a cowbell sound. It’s usually a couple of hours here and there, usually at weekends. I guess you could say that the work on this album started around the summer, the (misguided) hope was that I’d have it finished by the end of the year. Although getting married certainly holds things up, as I have done recently, not that I’m complaining – it was a wonderful day. So it’s looking like it will be a spring release, but who knows? The good thing about being an independent musician, free of the constraints (and money) of record companies is that you have no deadline. So you can work at your own place, which is good when you have to work for a living in a full-time job.
It also means you can throw out EPs and such whenever you want. Which is something I may do prior to this album, as a free taster of what’s to come. Who knows, there maybe an EP in time for Christmas!
So far I’ve got one finished track called, “Closing Time”, which is the very first track I’ve done with vocals, you can hear a rough mix on the myspace page. I also have several half-finished, nearly-finished and sketchy ideas. More about them in the next part as I’ve realised I’ve probably taken far too much of your time already…

Tags: blog, home recording, mister fusty, new album