We use our rehearsal recordings to play around an sketch with our songs. We cut loops from a take, put more guitars or bass onto it, or add some drums to a riff we recorded while rehearsing.

Sometimes we sketch with the vocals the same way. Recording a take, and looping the chorus while singing on top of it is a lot less tedious than playing the song 200 times.

A lot of our sketching is done in Apple’s Garageband because we all know how to use it.

A little clip of experimentation in the area of guitar-noise thingamagicks. First try and we’ve got enough ideas to last a lifetime...

A snippet of a rehearsal take. We record almost all takes when we’re writing songs so we can listen to them during the week.

We often notice a particular note, melody or word we really like from an idea we discarded earlier, and put that back into the song. Some spontaneous mistakes lead to other interesting ideas.

In this case the guitar solo was a random improvisation and we thought it was very good so we’re going to *try* to replicate it on the actual recording.

This 2-mic recording of a rehearsal take is now our recording blueprint for the song.