Welcome to the start of Lula week! Very excited to show you what we have in store. If you don’t know Lula, she’s someone who has been silencing rooms for the past year with her dreamy and melancholic performances across Leeds and beyond. Someone who has been an avid scene enjoyer, but now a participator, with a sizeable catalog of captivating stories and spell-binding tunes to accompany them. She’s someone I've been in awe of since hearing her early demos and has developed her own voice, slightly shedding the Nashville twang for her natural West Yorkshire drawl to come through a bit more. On top of all this, she does a little bit of editing for us on the channel, as you can see she edited this very video.

This was the second song we worked on, for her upcoming release with Contact Buzz ‘Title’ and this time we actually used a studio, none other than Eiger’s very special Monomyth Room. Lula invited Rhiannon Hope’s Ludo to help us out with some drums. Drum machines are the usual order for Lula, but I thought we would benefit from a change in strategy. Cult Song is the first song on the EP, so it needed to come out swinging and that required a rare upbeat tune from the songwriter. Ludo picked us up in their gig mobile and off to the land of Eiger we went.

The first thing on the menu was to test out Ludo’s company wide discount, as they work for Jack Simpson owned Holding Patterns. We didn’t need it in the end, as the coffee for the monomyth room is free! Oh Eiger, you spoil us. We shuffled into the room, gabbed for a good while and got the drums set up, probably spending the most time getting the green screen pinned to the wall. I think that snare sound is mega, it’s got a right chime to it, sounds almost like a punch from an old street fighter game. We crotch mic’d using the at2020 and then placed an sm57 to the side of the snare. After that we gave Ludo a tambourine, the one thing bands forget to add (if you want a hit, bring out the tambo).

No bass, the tambourine was more important than the bass. We moved onto Lula’s electric guitar. The right mix of jangle and indie rock. In the final mix it ends up being a little buried, but only because we thought the acoustic would hit more at the front. We did a vocal take with this new telephone style mic, the BM88 by Owen the Bastard @owenthebastard on Instagram. Bob Brazill was kind enough to give me it, but unfortunately that didn’t make the final cut, but expect to hear more from that little beast. We then searched the monomyth room high and low for a synth to fit the Lula sound, but after half an hour of playing around, we decided to give up on the search. Sometimes it's better the devil you know and Lula’s perfect Yamaha PSR 200 was sat right in her room.

So we called it for the day, with drums, guitar and a vocal take. Sometimes it's best to leave it for another time if you don't think you’re going to create the best tune on the day. So we reconvined at Lula’s flat, where Walter rules the roost (Lula’s cat, not some weird man). First of all, we recorded over that vocal take - always sad but Lula admitted it wasn’t her favourite take. We pulled the fantastic PSR 200 out for that gritty lo-fi organ sound (I need to get this keyboard, can’t believe she got it for free). We bussed that together with the lower guitar tone and stuck that on the right. We needed that jangle and what better way to get it than Lula’s iconic Horse Acoustic? Always a little chorus and delay on that bad boy and there we had the massive 80’s style instrumental - probably the closest to Cleaners from Venus i’ve got so far.

Then onto her vocals. Other tracks have focused on the telephone mic, in fact, this is the first track we've done together where we used a non-telephone mic - it was the AT2020. We used the Sea Machine Chorus just to give that double tracked illusion and a little grit, delay decay but not much honestly. I really love how non-traditional we go with vocals on Contact Buzz. I think it is a great example of a wildly different kind of vocal to your standard studio decision, but it's just so fun. I think this is my favourite Lula track and that's really saying something, she's one of my favourite artists to record and even though she's only been doing it less than a year, I know this EP release she's doing ‘Music and Love Horses’ is going to absolutely slap. Get ready for Friday for more Lula hits!

For Fans of: Cleaners from Venus, Neutral Milk Hotel and Radiator Hospital