On tour with fellow Melbourne band
Deloris, Pitching Wood have a history with the
band – their frontman,
Hugh Counsell, is currently recording their new record – an
audio engineer by day, he also assisted on their
Fake Our Deaths release. As such, when it came
time to produce Pitching Woo’s debut EP Yours,
etc., he knew exactly what to do…more
or less.
“We didn’t go into a recording studio
and just record,” he explains. “It was
done over bits and pieces, and it seemed like the
natural thing to do when you’ve got a recording
studio. That being said, when it came to the mixing
stage I did drag in a friend and mentor, Chris Dickie,
to do the mixing because I had no perspective at
all because we’d been listening to the songs
for so long, so it was good to have another bunch
of ears to put it all together.”
He states that he loves the freedom
and to be able to record his own vocals, with just
myself in the
room, and be free to explore ideas as they come. “If
you have somebody else recording you, you tend to
be on the clock because you’re paying for someone
else’s time,” he says. “If I’m
just doing it myself I can experiment far more and
do stuff that probably won’t work but I want
to hear it not work for myself.”
The production style for Pitching
Woo came about as there were a number of people
who came and went
throughout the recording process. Hugh built the
studio and had all this recording gear and it was
a means of expressing ideas – they weren’t
recording to expressly make anything, but instead
to work out ideas and, most importantly, have fun.
A lot of it was learning how to use the equipment. “I
started off in a bigger studio and it was good to
go in and start using equipment not necessarily the
way it was meant to be used, and we came up with
some good stuff like that,” he clarifies.
The obvious plan from here is to
make an album, and he agrees that the group are
always jotting down
ideas and recording them, and after this current
tour will be focussing on an album, with the intent
of releasing it mid-next year. “We’ve
got a boatload of songs now, because we had to write
to play live, basically,” he says. “Some
of the songs on the EP were written on the computer
and they weren’t written expressly to play
live, so we had to learn how to play them live.”
For the live show, Pitching Woo
have added a keyboardist who has samplers, so they
can bring quite a bit of
the production side of the things to the table. “It
took a little while to work it out because the songs
were written in a different way – I didn’t
write them in a bedroom and then we jammed them out,
but they were more refined and then it was like ‘okay,
how’re we going to play this?’.”
As such, changes were required and
the band had to write little new parts to keep
themselves interested
as well. It’s taken Pitching Woo some time
to bring it all together since formation in 2001,
as there were initial line-up issues, and each member
had numerous things to do with their lives. At the
start of 2005 they seemed to be ready and raring
to go – the line-up established, the gigs were
set, and then two days out from their debut live
shows their drummer had a bad bike crash, and smashed
his shoulder into five pieces.
“That’s basically why the EP came about
too,” Hugh explains. “We’d been
rehearsing for quite a while, and the songs did take
a while to learn because they’re not something
we could teach in one jam. We didn’t want to
get a new drummer to fill in, so we wanted to keep
the ball rolling and record an EP to test the water.
This EP has been fantastic for that, because we’ve
learned so much about releasing something ourselves,
and it’s made us open our eyes and see how
easy it is to put things out for yourself.”
Given that it was a studio creation
as a result of drummer going down – how very Spinal Tap – the
new songs vary differently, as they’ve come
from a performance aspect rather than a studio base. “We
try and approach everything quite differently,” Hugh
points out. “There are new songs that I’ve
started writing in the bedroom with an acoustic guitar,
and I’ve presented them to the band we’ve
nutted them out in a rehearsal studio. That’s
been awesome to have a couple of songs like that,
and there’s also Nat, who plays keys, who comes
from a hip-hop production background and he does
a lot of ambient things in the studio that we’ll
build on and then Donavan is writing a lot of things
at home on his guitar.”
Pitching Woo’s Yours,
etc. EP
is out now, with the band touring the nation. Dates:
11 August – The Hopetoun, Sydney
18 August – East Brunswick Club, Melbourne
19 August – ANU Bar, Canberra
