recording New Order's Sirens

[IM_]

Hello John! greetings from Moscow

I really adore your all your works, especially with New Order, the Stone Roses and Radiohead (their only CD that i really like and listen).

Could you tell something about recording New Order's last album?

1. How did you and the band generally build up the songs? Were there any "basic" sessions when all musicians played together? This album seems more "played" than "programmed" in comparison to their previous albums. A lot of live drums etc, more guitars..

2. Any tips on recording synths? New Order for me was always a band where all synth sounds and parts sounded very "with the music". I never had a sense of "oh, this is Nord!" or "this is andromeda", "this is memorymoog" or "it's a Roland sampler"

All sounds are really unique and fit the songs perfectly - I never seen this in other bands' production. Character of the device is washed away - you hear the character of the song instead.

thanks in advance!

[johnleckie]

Hello Moscow
All the tracks were demoed by the band at Stephen's studio in hills near Macclesfield in UK. Some lyrics were written and some songs were just snippets and some completely finished. They had lots ( about 40?) Very few were 'played' and all files are 'manipulated' in ProTools.
Synths are really just DI'ed with best quality di boxes and cables. They would never use presets and always spend lot of time programing and shaping sounds in synth. Often the song is conceived because of 'found' synth sound/rhythm. There's also a lot of stacking up of sounds on the multi track.
Cheers JL