2006.10.18: The making of Transmission

Transmission was entirely self-financed and produced by Moeker. A year of gigging and pouring everything we made back into the band left us with enough cash to book some studio time and a catalogue of songs to record. The basic tracks were laid down over one rainy weekend at Koolworld Studios in Luton, with additional recording and mixing done at Moeker's own Echo Base studios.

The plan was always to mix the album ourselves, primarily for economic reasons. Studio time is expensive and mixing takes a lot of time, especially when perfectionists like Martin are involved! The studio takes were recorded on an Otari RADAR digital multitrack, then each track from each take was exported out as raw audio and imported into the Moeker Pro Tools rig ready for mixing.

Work began on the mixes in January 2005 and was completed at the beginning of May 2005. Martin mixed the whole album, working in his spare time in the evening and at weekends. Final synth tracks for the album were laid down at Echo Base, plus additional guitar overdubs and backing vocals.

Our long-time designer Tim Jarvis from Profission brought in artist Andrew Zbihljy to collaborate on the cover artwork, and the CD was launched in September 2005, completing a year-long recording process.

Here’s a few (hopefully) interesting facts and one or two easter eggs to listen out for:

* Recorded at 24-bit/48kHz, the whole album’s audio files took up around 30Gb of disk space.
* The wah guitar in Sunset/Up is a sample from Neil’s original demo version, recorded years before the version on Transmission.
* The guitar solo at the end of Third is actually one-take scratch solo, and was never intended to be the final version of the solo.
* The working title for the song that become Breaking You was Peaches.
* At the end of Breaking You, the song dies away abruptly, because Martin accidentally cut off the tail end of the track samples and had to disguise the mistake.
* When mixing Déjà Vu, Martin checked with Neil over MSN if the chorus guitar elements were in the right order by transcribing the pattern in text thusly: duh duh, duh duh squee (arpeggio up), duh duh squee (arpeggio down) duh duh squee...
* Though not credited on the CD inlay, both Tris and Martin also contributed synth parts; Tris on Unlucky for Humans (bleeps and vocoded vocals), and Martin on Succumb (strings), Third (electric piano) and Transmission (assorted strings and noises).
* Every single track on the album maxed out the 32-track limit we had in Pro Tools, and the CPU power we had available to us for plugin processing.

We am Moeker. That is all.



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