Westingway : The Live E.P.
- Jon Wheeler
- Mar 30
- 3 min read
A little while back, Jeff and I released our latest single, ‘I Get That All The Time’ - and normally, once I’d done a little bit of promotion and the like for it, we’d decide which song we were going to record next, and try to schedule some time….
Listen to 'I Get That All The Time' here...
or...
THIS TIME though, we had other ideas. Well…. I did, and Jeff went along with it, as he usually does. “Let’s not record a new song, let’s record a live E.P. of us just playing some of the stuff we’ve already done….like we’re at a gig…..”
This idea was partly born from the fact that I have friends who have recently released, or are releasing their own albums in 2026. Jeff and I kind of work to a different strategy. We basically just record a song and put it out. No timescales, no pressure, enjoy ourselves, play some music with our friends, and when we’re ready to share, we share.
We are both “old school” though, and of the generation where having a physical copy of our music actually means something. We could make up and order 500 cds, maybe sell a dozen or so over the next year, give some to friends and have 200+ each in our respective attics for the next twenty years….but that’s what everybody does.
The Plan Evolves...
I was ‘tickled’ therefore by a recent development in vinyl record production. Getting vinyl has been generally even less cost effective than cds, because tooling costs are pretty significant before you even got a sniff of the vinyl. There’s now a company called Elastic Stage however, whom it appears you upload your music and artwork to, and they cut your record, to order, no minimum quantity. Jeff and I decided this sounds cool. Yes, it’s still going to be expensive, relatively speaking, but far more practical - so we’ve decided we’re going to give it a go.
Three weeks ago we met up and recorded seven songs live in the studio. We did however immediately manage to go off plan, because two of the songs we successfully recorded, Jeff hadn’t heard before, and we certainly hadn’t played together - which makes me wonder why we didn’t just record a new single…… anyhoo….. Yesterday we started mixing.
Now under normal circumstances, we mix each single differently, depending on the requirements of the song. But this is ‘live’....and we want it to sound like we just set up and played, so every song is going to, near as we can manage it, have the same EQ and effects treatments, which totally makes sense.
What would also totally make sense therefore is to create some kind of global template we can simply apply to each individual recording, once we’ve determined what settings work best…. We however, could not work out how to do that, so Jeff took a photo of every screen so that we could manually copy the setting across.
It wasn’t so bad…. Each song has five channels. My vocal, through my normal Shure SM58 gigging microphone, my acoustic guitar into a condenser mic (which also picked up a bit of vocal and Jeff’s cajon), my direct guitar sound through my pedalboard into the desk, and two mics on Jeff’s cajon, one for the top, and one for the bass. We chose pre-sets in Presonus (the recording software we use) for each of the instruments, did a few tweaks and some creative panning and gain control, and we had our blueprint.
From what I’ve heard so far, I think it’s going to work, and after a quick, initial listen to all the tracks, I think we’re going to be able to choose at least four, (which in my mind is kind of the minimum) we’ll need for the project. We’re going to fine tune and master all of them though, unless we detect any seriously iffy playing, because spare tracks can always be saved and used as demos on Soundcloud.
So… all good I think. It’s going to be really interesting to see how this works out. I’m going to have a proper listen over the next few days, maybe think about some artwork. I’ll keep you posted.
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