July is all but over. Grey overcast skies have been circling overhead for the most part. Suppose it wouldn't be festival season without getting caught in a downpour or three. Perhaps not too much of a shame then that we'll be locked away in the studio over the coming weeks - cue instant sunshine whilst we frazzle inside!

Since June we've spent our normal rehearsal time down at the studio honing and working on the new tunes. What started out as a plan to get the new tracks down has grown a bit. The original list of tunes included On, which we've been playing for ages and was just too late to make it on to Lost Days & Nights, Rebel Rising, which we played live on our recent BBC Introducing live session, and Saviour which is a pretty rocking tune that we've played out a couple of times. Added to that are several other tunes that we've been kicking around a bit, and a few new ones that've come together in the last month or so. You might've heard snatches of a few of them at a soundcheck, but they're going to be new to most of you. Might be the odd surprise in there too.

As well as time down the studio a few of us were regularly round at Marc's place bashing through various ideas. Some of those tracks came together quickly enough to bring in to the studio and play through as a full band. Others we just ran out of time for getting done this time round. We've ten tracks ready to record but it could easily have been more, but with an August deadline to get started we had to draw the line somewhere.

Tomorrow sees the last of the pre-production sessions. We've been recording our sessions to my portable Zoom recorder, or sometimes for a bit more clarity we've used a different room and stuck a couple of overhead mics up to capture what we've been playing (in fact I'm uploading today's recordings as I type). It's a pretty useful exercise to listen back afterwards and hear how things sound so we can tweak parts and arrangements before we record, rather than realising too late, and wishing that we'd done something a bit differently. The session we had today and the one on Sunday should be more about getting things tight rather than any big changes, plus it's another chance to try out some of the instruments we may use on the recordings.  It's all coming together pretty well.

As I mentioned earlier, we start the actual recording next week. Exciting times. Shane's already been busy setting the drums up ready.  We've not fixed a date for release, although we would like to get the tunes out sooner rather than later.  We may yet make the tracks available first as bite sized (possibly EP) chunks. We'll be playing it by ear as we don't want to be away from playing live too long.  We blogged the making of the last record over on wordpress, and will be posting updates here on the DA website with how this one is taking shape, so you know where to come for updates.