The making of The Gregson's Room Sessions
Hmm, I'm trying to remember where this story really begins, I think it happened when Jonathan Tait, and Owen (Kitchener) Davis released their group's EP ("...on the road" by "Suburban Atmosphere"), at the time, I didn't know either Gareth, or Gregson, but I knew of them. One day I talked to Gareth, told him I knew Jonathan (JT), and he told me he'd like to record an album himself. I told him I work as sound engineer at St. John's Church, Whorlton, and we talked about how we might be able to actually make the album.
A few months later, I became good freinds with Dan Gregson, who used to invite a few people round to his house during "Free" lessons. Later that year, I heard of a device that had just come to the market: The SONY PCM-D50, a Liner PCM Recorder.... basically, a device that records sound into uncompressed WAV format, and has two condencer microphones built in, costing at the time $500 (that is USD, as I imported it from the USA, many months before it was released in the UK). When I told Gareth about this neat little gadget, we decided we should get around to recording the album.
As we were at Gregson's pretty much every day, we thought, "why not record it here?", so Gregson let us use his bedroom as a recording studio, as it was nice and small to get the right acoustics. We started with the song "I Spy" on the 18th January, as a kind of test run (if you listen closely, you will hear the clock on the wall in Gregson's bedroom, something we later removed from all other sessions)
We did a second session on the 23rd January, on both the first and second session, we recorded only the song, stopping the recoding after each song. After the second session, I had the idea we should film the rest of them, so I brought my Cam Coorder to the remainder of the sessions and left the PCM-D50 running all the time... this led to a more natural documentary (which can be viewed here btw). Strangely, the documentary was finished before the album!
After the first two sessions, I made a rough draft of the album, just titled "Gareth Davies - Demos", later he decided "Kitchener" is a more unique name! The album cover was a picture stolen from Gareth's personal Myspace. The name "The Gregson's Room Sessions" came after the first few tracks were uploaded to his music Myspace and he named them "The Gregson's Room Recordings" (we later thought "Sessions" was a better word as it sounded more professional)
<-- The old artwork for the album
When the last session ended on February 5th, I got down to mixing the album, it appeared on http://music.op-ezy.co.uk/gareth_kitchener within a matter of weeks, though due to exams, the final physical version didn't get completed till mid June!
