Studio Diaries: High Tides - I'm Not Giving Up I'm Just Starting Over (2017)

Nottingham Quintet High Tides classify themselves as ‘putting emo into pop punk since 2015’. The members have for the most part, been in each other’s lives for many years, some even from school age: “We’ve all been in bands previously both together and separately, but this final line up just clicked instantly both musically and socially”. Within the busy sphere pop punk, they comment that what sets them apart from their contemporaries is both their music and their live show: “We feel our sound brings some fresh elements to the UK Pop punk sound, being a bit deeper and more mature than other bands on the scene, tending to stray from the typical ‘In sound’ currently being shared. Live it’s always crazy energetic and we put absolutely everything into it, we don’t feel we’ve done a good enough job unless we come off stage looking like we’ve had a bath in sweat.” With their forthcoming mini-album, ‘I’m Not Giving Up, having recently seen release, on March 17 th via Scylla Records to be exact, the band are here to discuss the recording process…

We were actually pretty prepared going into the studio. We decided to work with our friend Myroslav Borys at Jigsaw Audio in Derby. Myroslav recorded our previous EP Home Truths and it came our great, plus he is a friend of ours so going into the studio with him is really relaxed, friendly, and its just really good fun to work with him.

We'd written all the songs we wanted to have included, we'd played them live a few times, and we were pretty happy with them in general. We did the usual system that seems to work for us, and a lot of other artists: going in and getting the basics of the songs done fairly quickly, before getting down to the finer things. We first laid down a rough guitar part for each track just for the basic structure of the songs. Our drummer then spend a couple of days laying down all his parts for the album until he was happy. We then moved onto recording the bass for each track. Guitars were then recorded over a couple of days. But the longest process was probably the vocals as Chris was pushing himself to his limits to get the best out of his voice, as well as layering several harmony and gang vocal tracks over all of the songs.

As we were pretty prepared going into the studio we didn't really experience any hiccups or problems whilst recording. We just got in, did our thing, and finished it pretty successfully. We love the way the album came out. Myroslav did an incredible job with the final product, and made every song more than we could have imagined.