There are so many videos on YouTube these days, showing artists working in a studio, with all the stereotypical activities on display: headphones; huge mixing desk; big red sofa; band members leaning on the console etc, that it almost seems like mimicry when you do find yourself in such an environment and performing such actions. Recording Gifts From Crows Trio’s first album at the Motor Museum Studios, in Liverpool, has been a happy experience: three days of moments of concentration mixed with long periods of listening and patching as necessary – sitting on a bright red sofa watching the engineer Ben work his magic as one member of the trio drops in a patch over an earlier dodgy moment.

Track by track we worked through the 12 tunes targeted for this release, which is basically a collection of reworks of some of the earlier solo Gifts From Crows tracks, laid down by Richard Laurence during the COVID lockdown.

The studio facilities are outstanding – not long after setting my kit up it was surrounded by 16 microphones of different shapes and sizes, some notably vintage, together with room mics, and a lengthy session ensued getting the levels of each right. Helen was in her booth, again with room capturing microphones as well as closer ones: her fabulously rich sounds emerging in the control room, where Richard was playing from his Roland Fantom – a hug beast of a machine!

For the playback we would gather in the control room where engineer Ben was able to nudge my odd off-beat, or drop in a new sequence by Helen or Richard. In this painstaking way the basic run through we started with is polished, ready for later mixing.

Three days later – around 30 hours – we finished the first phase of our album. It’s now down to Richard to mix the 32 channels into a finished album, hopefully out in time for our October 1st gig in Chester.