Equipment list

Instruments:
Korg Triton Extreme : Drums, pianos
Hammond XM-1 w/H&K Rotosphere : Organ
Manikin Memotron Rack : 3 violins, flute, 8-voice choir, Brass B
Waldorf MicroWave Mk1 : chorus lead on 'Tigers with beautiful voices'
Moog Voyager : Lead, bass synthesizer
Studer A807 : tape manipulation on 'Tigers with beautiful voices'
Epiphone Thunderbird Gothic bass, with TL Audio 5051 voice channel
Apex 460 valve microphone, with TL Audio 5050 compressor
Additional effects:
Watkins Copicat tape delay (vocals and synthesizers)
Electroharmonix Small Clone chorus pedal (vocal processing on 'Tigers with beautiful voices')
TL Audio FAT-1 compressor (Triton etc)
TL Audio 5021 stereo bus compressor
SPL Vitalizer Jack stereo expander
Vesta-Kaza RV3 Spring Reverb
Recording and mixing:
TASCAM TSR-8 using only tracks 1,3,5 and 7 and no DBX.
Tape used for tracking was Quantegy 406.

Studer A807 stereo master recorder. Tape used for mixdown was RMGI SM900.

Soundcraft MFXi 24 mixing desk. The Lexicon digital processor was not used.

Recording

The bed tracks were sequenced. It would have been nice to have done things otherwise but I'm more of a composer and a pretty awful musician.
To keep things fair, the sequence was edited down so that each instrument was given a single mono track, e.g. drums on 3, Strings on 7, Organ on 5 etc.

No track-sharing or multitimbrality was allowed, though the contents of each track could change over time, e.g. strings at one point, later the lead synth and then the M400 choir, but never at the same time.

At one point the ending on 'Fae Story' had a shared track that I had missed. To avoid cheating, I recorded a new version of the ending and added it to the end by means of tape splicing.

No timecode was used so the backing tracks were recorded live across the 4 tracks available with no going back afterwards.

The 4 backing tracks were then mixed down to the stereo master recorder, and bounced back onto tracks 5 and 7 of the TASCAM. This was done on a second tape, just in case anyone wants to see the original bed tracks.

This then gave me a stereo backing track, and two spare tracks to add vocals/bass/any additional synthesizer overdubs (played by hand).

In principle I could have recorded the sequencer output to a stereo pair and saved having to do the reduction mix, but that felt like cheating.
In any case I figure the additional effort, tape costs and generation loss is a suitable penalty for using a sequencer in the first place, and besides that's how this kind of thing was done on Penny Lane etc.

A 24-track version of 'A Fae Story' has been previously released on the 'Incubi and Succubi' album in 2013. A 24-track demo of 'Tigers with beautiful voices' has also been made available, but is not likely to appear on an album proper until 2016. While I considered lifting tracks from the master tapes of those songs I resisted the temptation. Synchronizing them without any form of timecode would have been painful in any case.

The tape effects on 'Tigers' was done using the shuttle control on the A807 and some scrap tape which had been used for flanging vocals on a previous project.

Tapes used during the project

1/2" 8-track backing tracks (recorded on 1,3,5 and 7)
2. 1/4" stereo mixdown of backing tracks
3. 1/2" 8-track 2nd gen master (backing tracks on 5 and 7, 1 and 3 for overdubs)
4. 1/4" stereo final master
Digitization and post

Digitization was done at 24/96 using a TASCAM DA3000 outboard recorder.
Digital post-processing was limited to cutting the tracks into separate files.
mhWaveEdit was used for this since it works directly on the raw data, whereas Audacity works by converting to an internal floating point datatype first, which means that even simple cut-and-paste editing will not return a byte-for-byte copy of the original audio.

The EP plays quite well in a single file, the gaps between tracks having been adjusted by razorblade editing.

No EQ or level adjustment was peformed in the editor, though the gain was increased by 1.4 during conversion to 16/44 (using SoX) e.g.

sox 1.wav -r 44100 -b 16 output/1-A_Fae_Story.wav vol 1.4