The Bluejays present ‘The Complete Soup Sessions’ now available for free download via The Bluejays Official Bandcamp.
It’s easy for The Bluejays to feel at home at Soup Studio. Located onboard Lightship 95 (a decommissioned floating lighthouse), Soup is one Studio that really rocks the boat! It’s the perfect analogue recording facility for The Bluejays. Whether it’s the sepia-toned mid-century interior decor, the 48 channel Calrec mixing console or the well thumbed collection of Kerouac novels on the shelf, the studio offers the closest thing to Golden era recording this side of Memphis. They have a 24 track 2" tape machine, a beautiful piece of equipment that helps us accurately recreate classic cuts made at the likes of Sun Studio and Chess Records in the 1950s. Their reverb options include a ‘stereo plate’, a purpose built tiled echo chamber and several spring reverb tanks. Exactly what we need for those early 60’s surf tracks like ‘Wipeout’. Safe to say, they know a thing or two about how to make a ‘vintage’ sounding record.
The Bluejays Official Bandcamp page deserved a fresh perspective on our studio recorded output. We decided to put out The Complete Soup Sessions album when we realised that we hadn’t specifically grouped our recordings in this way before. We started listening back to a lot of the material we have cut over the last four years. There were certain tracks that had this unique sound, somehow ‘older’. When we realised that a lot of them were from Soup Studio, we wanted to showcase the effect of recording in the very specific way that this studio allows.
‘Geek-Out Warning’ (The Bluejays talk Vintage Recording Gear')
Soup have a unique selection of vintage instruments available for use at any time, as well as one of London’s most impressive collections of vintage microphones. Their 1950’s RCA 44 is one of the most iconic mics in recording history and was used on pretty much all of the lead vocals for the ‘Soup Sessions’ album. It can be seen in our video of ‘Who Do You Love’. They have 1960’s Neumann U87s, Coles ribbon mics; a firm Beatles favourite and countless other vintage gems.
The amps alone are worth checking in for; Fender Bassman, Fender Champ, Fender Twin. One particular acoustic guitar, borrowed from the studio, has been used on almost all of the recordings on this album, a beautifully aged Gibson J50 from 1954.
THE COMPLETE SOUP SESSIONS
On the Bluejays Official Bandcamp page you’ll find other albums we have on offer, but the ‘Complete Soup Sessions’ offers something special. The songs we have recorded at the studio have been varied and spanned pretty much the whole of rock and roll’s ‘Golden Era’. From the very ‘first’ Rock and Roll song, Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’, released in 1954 to Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’, released in 1964. Throughout this classic decade music production techniques were experimented with and evolved rapidly. On every song we have worked within the production context of the time the track was originally released. Painstaking? Yes! But worth it? We think so!