late night session

"the control room"

we're up late tonight recording rick.

we ate a fine dinner of beans on toast and poached eggs, lay down for an hour and then got started around 11pm. it's a pretty quiet place in general (we're the last house on a dirt road), but in the middle of the night we don't have to fight the tractors, birds and cows for recording time. the only noise we have to worry about is our own. rick, adrian and i are all sitting in the same room so if we shift in our seats, can't control a cough or sneeze or type a little too loudly on the laptop, it's picked up on the recording. in virginia we're used to recording in the studio where the control room is separate from the live room, and sometimes we forget that we're in the room with rick! it's been quite funny - we've started to develop our own silent language of mouthing words and making gestures - sometimes we understand each other perfectly and other times we think we understand each other but really don't at all! there have been some interesting miscommunications so far. i bet by the end of this month we'll be reading each others minds.

rick has been playing some great traditional american tunes tonight including "see the devil", "billy in the low land" and "texas barbed wire".  we shot a video of rick playing "billy in the low land" with a wonderful view of the farm next door in the background, but the internet hasn't been strong enough to post it. maybe something to post when we're back in the u.s of a.

here are a few pictures of our night thus far:

"the live room"
rick playing harmonica and irish banjorine

(we're recording in a one room cottage - the same cottage we're sleeping in  - in fact, that's our bed that rick is sitting on!)

adrian listening

just a few out of the extensive harmonica collection