Q&A WITH HUBRECHT ABOUT THE NEW ALBUM

My reply took longer then expected, because there were so many good questions! Here we go:

What delays did/will you use? Pedal board walk-through please! By Maurits Nienhuis on Facebook
What kind of effect pedals do you use Hubrecht? By @Anthea on Twitter
In the studio we always use digital effects. All delays on the guitars come from Pro-Tools, no pedals were used while tracking. The great thing about that is, that you can adjust and change any delay or effect whenever you want. It’s really flexible. If you record parts with a certain amount or type of effect in realtime, and you change your mind later on in the process, you have to re-record the entire part. That can be pretty time consuming and frustrating. Live I use a Dunlop 95Q Cry Baby wah, a Dunlop DVP-1 volume pedal, and all delay, reverb, compression, phaser, boost, tremolo and pitch come from my TC Electronic G-System. With my G-System I can switch multiple effects like delay and pitch (for example for the intro of ‘In Your Arms’) and channels on my amp at the same time. In almost every part of our songs we use different effects and gain settings on the amp, so with this setup I can switch all of this really quick without too much tap dancing.

How many times did you guys watch the Bold and the Beautiful while recording? ; ) By Tim van Doorn on Facebook
Haha not a single time. Sorry to disappoint you. I did watch a lot of movies the past few weeks. When you’ve been concentrating and focusing on music the entire day in the studio your brain is fried at the end of the day. At that point I love to just watch a movie and don’t think about anything. I watched a lot of movies starring Jason Statham with Laurens; ‘Chaos’ was our favorite.

Have you experienced any cases of language / cultural barrier? Inside or outside the studio? By Riekus van Montfort on Facebook
On a cultural level, not really. Maybe except for our producer James’ taste of and vision on music, in a very positive way. We’re exactly on the same page about the fact that we want our music to be powerful, catchy and have interesting and big arrangements. He really gets what we are going for. Language wise it can be difficult, we experienced that especially with the first album we recorded in America. Music is all about feeling and emotion, and it’s really hard to even express that in your own language sometimes. But because this is the second record we’re working with James it’s a lot easier now, we kind of use the same dictionary haha. And because we’ve spent so much time in America, I think we’ve lived in America for about 5 months now in total, our English improved too. But for example there was this situation where Robin was doing vocals for a song, and James told him he thought some notes were a bit ‘shaky’. Robin thought James ment that he shouldn’t use any vibrato, but James actually ment that he should sing it stronger, but with vibrato. So after a few takes Robin went into the control room and they talked about it in detail, and then found out they both meant something totally different haha.

Will there be a Dutch tour after the album comes out? If so, will you play Limburg? By Cindy Knapen on Facebook
The release show for the album will be on April 6 in Melkweg Amsterdam. We will probably play some other club shows in The Netherlands this year too, but can’t confirm anything about that yet.

What do you guys want to achieve in 2012? By Samantha van de Ven on Facebook
Release our new album, release our DVD ‘FOOTPRINTS: a year in the life’, play summer festivals, and play shows across Europe to promote the new album.

Any collabs with other artists? By @jjongism on Twitter
No, there are no features by other artists. We thought about it, but if we do something like that we really want it to add something to the song and we don’t want just have somebody else on the album for the sake of having someone else on the album haha. Maybe next time!

Can you tell something about the outboard gear you are using? By @Hinnieboeboe on Twitter
We use multiple microphone pre-amps, compressors and EQs. James has a rack with amazing outboard gear in his studio, and we use a lot of processing while tracking. Because James is so experienced he knows how far he can push it during tracking so you have to do a lot less processing during the mixing. Most of James’ gear is custom made. He uses a 1176 style compressor on vocals for example, and a Fairchild kind of compressor on bass. For every instrument he has different ones. And during mixing a lot of the sound comes from the SSL 4000 E board he mixes on. The channel strip EQ and compression are amazing and very typical. They are really warm an dirty.

Favorite lyric off the new album? By @bex_themonkey on Twitter
The lyric that means the most to me by far is a song called ‘Night Skies’. Robin wrote this lyric when my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and for months straight I have listened to the demo of Night Skies every day, when I went to see her in the hospital. Most of the time Robin writes lyrics that you can interpret in multiple ways, and for me this lyric captured a big part of how I was feeling at that time. A lot of the lyrics on our new record are more emotional and maybe a bit heavier than the ones on Lightspeed I think. In the process of writing this album we’ve gone through some pretty heavy emotions, some very sad, some fantastic, and I think that shows in some of the lyrics and the way Robin is able to deliver them.

How much time did you spend in the studio for your first album? Are you doing something different this way around? By @Lotte_Music on Twitter
For the first album we’ve spent about six weeks in the studio. For the second record the amount of time we’re in the studio is about the same, around six weeks too. The great thing about this album is that we knew how recording an album with a producer works. We knew how to prepare for the studio, how much we had to rehearse, what the global schedule was going to be and so on. In the recording process we didn’t change much, because we were really happy with the work flow in the studio with the first record. I only paid a little more attention to the scheduling this time, so we could avoid the 20-hour workdays in the studio at the end of the recording and mixing process, like we had the first time.

How bad is the smell? ; ) By @NikkiOldekamp on Twitter
It’s pretty good actually! The airco works fine, and we don’t sleep in the studio but at a hotel. We take a shower every day so we’re fresh and clean when we get in the studio in the morning haha.

How long does it take to record and edit one full song? By @RatedRemy on Twitter
The average is around four days per song. Rough schedule: One day for pre-production, setting up the drums, tuning, and recording the drums. We’re extremely picky on drums because the entire song will be recorded over these drums, and drums are an important part of our music. Let’s say one day for bass and most of the electric guitars. We always record a shit load of guitars. First we do the rhythm guitars, then all the clean and crunch parts, and the lead parts. One day for acoustic guitars (takes a lot of time setting up because microphone placement and room sound are extremely important), and all keyboards, piano and synths. And one day for the lead vocals, editing vocals (going through the different takes and deciding on which parts are best) and all the backing vocals.

Do you use a lot of samples for the drums and why or not? By @MakeLeonCount on Twitter
We blend in samples on kick, snare and toms. We love extremely punchy, tight and powerful drum sounds, and our producer James is a genius in achieving that. Blending in samples works great, but it’s really important to make the original drum sounds as good as possible. James has incredible overhead microphones that pick up the entire drum kit and the room. If you hear those mics ‘solo’, you can’t believe a sound like that comes from just two mics. During mixing we sometimes brought the overheads up in certain parts of the songs to make the drums sound bigger and to add more of the ‘room’ sound.

In what country do you hope your new album sells the most and why? By @lovatogoesdutch on Twitter
I hope our new album sells the most in all countries of the world where we’ve never been before haha. So we can tour there!

What’s your favorite song of the new album and why? By @Silencegirl on Twitter
Which song are you currently most proud of? By Pieter Zwaan on Facebook
It’s hard to pick just one. I’m really proud of all the songs on our second album. But if I had to pick one I’d go for a song called ‘Best Kept Secret’ right now. It’s really dynamic, and some of my favorite lead guitar parts are in it. The song structure is very different from most songs, and we changed a lot of the arrangement during pre-production with James.

Do you already have an album title? How many songs are on the album? By @Addicted_to_ on Twitter
Yes we know! We will tell you all about it very soon, as well as the track listing. We’ll do something cool with it.

What kind of amps and microphones did you use? And what did you use for strings and effects? By @borjacobs on Twitter
We used a Bogner 4×12″ cabinet with a Shure SM57 in front of it. Really basic setup. The main amps we used were a Bad Cat 30R and a Bogner Ecstacy Classic. Guitars were a ’79 Gibson Les Paul Custom, a Tom Anderson Telecaster and a very old and rare G&L Stratocaster. James has a ton of different plugins for strings and effects, he uses a lot of Native Instruments bundles.

That’s it! Hope my answers are clear and useful!