Recording a Live Session at IMOUT Studios | Lucid Liars

It's Saturday and you know what that means.

Last year we recorded a live session at IMOUT Studios with Iain McLaughlin. We've been working with Iain on and off for years, recording some of the drums at his studio for 'Happy to Be Here.', rehearsing there occasionally, played some shows together, and generally just bouncing ideas and seeking advice from him. The music scene in Inverness is relatively small and as a younger band still treading our way through the musical landscape it's often important to engage with your peers and offer perspective and experience to each other, something we've really been holding dear over the last few years.

Initially I had an idea for the session and it boiled down to this: We have changed fundamentally as a band in the last 2 years, we have lots of new arrangements and technology at play, and I wanted some "live" versions of these arrangements. Particularly with 'Hard Times' and 'Grey', the songs are very different to how they sound on recordings. When picking the live session songs, we decided to go with our set opener, 'Hard Times', and our set closer, 'Grey', which are two songs that on essence are never played the same way twice. To have what is essentially a timestamp of where we were at this time available in both audio and visual form was important for me.

We had a back and forth with Iain on the best way to record these songs. He suggested utilising his rehearsal space so we'd be comfortable and able to bounce off each other with eye contact and queues (something that can be seen in the videos if you look closely), and to replicate the live setup by feeding everything in to his recording gear as it would be live. This involved a full drum mic setup, Iain's suggestion of mics, our own in ear monitoring system, and everything leveled and played at gig volume.

We spent some time on the initial setup, the vibes in the room were great. We spent a bit of time working out camera and lighting positions, Iain placed strategically off camera and listening to the session on headphones - guiding us on when something had clipped or otherwise gone wrong.

The gameplan was simple - take 3 songs, record them 3 times each, and take the best take of each. This turned out to be a bit of a monumental task considering 2 of these songs were 7+ minutes long (one take of Grey got up to 9 minutes due to the free form nature of the intro and outro), which proved quite draining. We ended up taking plenty of breaks, a couple of times just waiting outside in the cool air to recompose, offer reassurance and guidance to each other. We've been playing together so long at this point that we can recognise when it's time for a break. It's safe to say that while we often see each other at our best, there have been many occasions when we've seen each other at our worst. Iain was really patient with us during this, seemingly seen this before and understanding of the mission statement of the session.

Eventually we got everything we needed, as well as a mountain of video to dig through.

We settled on -

Hard Times Take 2

By My Side Take 3

Grey Take 2

Which was kind of funny to me as it makes it look like the first take was always the "warm up". Not to say there weren't plenty of false starts and other shenanigans going on.

Jackto did a phenomenal job of the video, and managed to capture the "band in a room" vibe well. Mixing was relatively smooth too - we felt we had captured this timestamp of where Lucid Liars was in 2025. We initially released the videos on to social media, then on to our often neglected YouTube channel, and most recently we've made it available on streaming services.

All in, the experience was valuable for us and something that we'd be keen to do again. I've recently been obsessed with ensuring that when Lucid Liars finishes up there's albums, videos, content in general to provide proof that the band itself existed. There's an in joke with our manager Steven that every year is our last year until we find motivation towards the end of the year - typically the September-November period of any given year is where we let self doubt creep in.

There are so many bands in Inverness that I enjoyed growing up that exist as a 4 track EP and a couple of live videos, usually little social media to dig through, and the bands themselves seem just live on in people's memories as opposed to physical releases and generally something tangible to hold on to. It's partly why I was so happy to see that Iain himself released his album this year. In ten years time, that album will still be there in some capacity, whether it's on someone's hard drive, Spotify, CD in the back of the car, whatever. When Lucid Liars is gone there will still be proof that we existed.

For us, these live sessions weren’t just about recording the songs. They're about documenting the journey of Lucid Liars as an independent band from Inverness. Whether it's an album, a live video, a blog post or a rehearsal recording, every piece becomes part of the story. Years from now, we hope people can look back and see not only the music we made, but the community, friendships and creative process that shaped it. We're lucky to be at the point in our journey where we can choose to simply engage with the people we like and actively we want to engage with, not the people we feel we have to as part of politicking or otherwise to create opportunities. For that, we're very thankful.

Until next time.