[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Ron,

Unfortunately Mike was never able to upload it onto YouTube due to a false copyright claim (the algorithm believed the video to be the original Beatles recording and blocked it).

So he uploaded it to Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/mikemassedotcom/videos/768569790205006/
You can also watch it here, embedded on this MLT Club page:
https://test4.monalisa-twins.com/if-i-needed-someone-release/

Please let us know if that plays for you there 🙂
We’re glad you like this Beatles cover. We head great fun with those 3 part harmonies.

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Peter,

First of all a big hello and thanks for joining us here at the Club! We hope you’ve already made yourself at home and that you’ll enjoy your stay.

Oh; the midlands are beautiful. We’d love to do more travelling across the country. When we used to play a lot more live shows a few years back, or while we toured the UK with Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel in 2015, we loved seeing more of England.

In fact, Birmingham was one of our favourite cities on that Steve Harley tour (your Symphony Hall is incredible!). We’d love to come back and play some more shows across the country but at the same time we really want to concentrate on new recordings, videos and stuff like the MLT Club and our online presence.

For the time being we’ve decided to stop playing live and focus on those things for now.
One chapter at a time 🙂

We’ll see what the next one will bring!

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Roger, the ones you are referring to have all been gifts, so we haven’t really thought about selling them on our website. They are super comfortable real leather straps so they would be quite expensive to produce and we’d have to sell them for a lot of money. But it would definitely be something we might add to the range later down the line.

Thanks for the interest 🙂

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Howard,
Just yesterday we posted a little video about our time in the States back in 2007, the holiday when the infamous “Alone” incident happened 😉 We didn’t include the video there, but we added some other super early performances we did on the trip.

Maybe we should have added some of the “Alone” video too but we didn’t want to make it too long and thought we might save that for another time. Or maybe I just don’t want to relive the trauma, haha. No, but it really wasn’t that great of a performance but we will have a look at the footage again and see if we find it worth posting.

Thanks for being so interested in our early, early beginnings. Back then we would have never ever thought that one day someone would care for those recordings.

And of course thanks for the nice words about Starman! We’re glad everyone seems to really like the video and setting. Yesss!

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Rick,

Of course, everyone goes about it a little differently, and the process changes depending on the song, setting, studio and equipment we have available but this is how we usually do it:

We normally work digitally, which means that we record audio through an interface into a computer (opposed to tape, like it was done primarily until the mid 70’s). Usually we start off with a super quick demo track where we play the song on our acoustic guitar and sing along, all in one microphone, so we have the structure and tempo mapped out. We use this as a guide to build the song around.

From then on it’s a bit like cooking 😉 Here’s a pizza analogy …
One by one we record each ingredient, normally starting with the “base” instruments like drums (pizza dough), bass (tomato sauce), rhythm guitar (cheese). Then one by one you add all the additional flavours like your vocals (peperoni), lead guitar (olives) and if you want to be a bit controversial, you add some pineapple in the form of Mona’s flute playing.

You record all the individual tracks (lay out your ingredients) and later, in the mixing process, make sure you add the right amount of each. So no ingredient overpowers the other in volume and the flavours you want to shine through, don’t get lost.

You add your effects like chorus, reverb, etc. like you would your spices – until you have the perfect balance 😉

Then it goes into the oven – the mastering stage – where you add some compression, and additional little tweaks to make it all blend together and become one coherent dish, uhm song.

You get the point 😉 It’s a big layering process. At least in the studio, that’s how you’d usually go about it. If you’re recording a live session, you record the whole performance in one go, but if possible, each instrument on their own track. Which is why normally everyone’s got their own microphone, each guitar is amp’ed separately, etc. So that later on you can still tweak the overall mix, add some effects like reverb, compression etc. and make it sound as well rounded as possible.

Hope that helped. Now I’m hungry 😉

P.S. Here is an article that summarises the basics of studio recording pretty well and in a more structured way, in case you are interested in reading up on the process a bit more: https://www.wikihow.com/Record-a-Song

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Roger,

We loved following the “guitar heaven thread” in the “general discussion” forum! Your guitar collection is astonishing! Quite different to ours but really interesting choices.

Anyway, sorry that it took us a while to get back to your question here. We’ve been thinking if there’s a way to make your request happen but we realised that we have so many of our guitars spread across the studio, home, storage, Vienna and the UK that we can’t really get one picture with all of them. But another MLT CLub member, Angelo, recently sent us a file in which he documented all our guitars wonderfully. He collected all the pictures, specs, etc. and made a pretty comprehensive list.
We will ask him if it’s okay to forward you his document, if you’d like to 🙂

Hope that helps!
Thanks and stay groovy,
Lisa

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Angelo,
It’s one of the guitars we bought when we first started playing. It’s supposed to be somewhat of a Gibson 335 copycat, made by a cheap online brand called “Santander”. It was long before we invested in some higher end guitars and it introduced us to different sounds and guitar styles from the usual “strat” style guitars we had in school.
But to be honest it wasn’t a great guitar, especially for beginners. Really heavy, didn’t stay in tune and felt quite clunky in general. But hey, you work with what you got and we felt super sophisticated playing “Smoke On The Water” on it, when we first got started 😛

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Howard!

Overall, loved the movie! It was a Father’s Day present so the whole family went (equipped with snacks and blankets). Doing anything outdoors in the UK is always a gamble but thankfully it didn’t rain!

It was the first time Mona and I watched the whole thing. We’ve seen other Monty Python movies and sketches and several clips from it but never in one sitting from start to finish. We’re glad we did it though, and it really was the perfect setting. We think it’s all the little details that make the movie work so the more attention you can pay the better.

There’s obviously the very British, silly humour which we love but as you said it’s the underlying satire on politics, religion and society that makes it such a classic movie that has already proven to stand the test of time. None of the topics really aged which you could say is rather tragic! But it makes the movie work to this day (and probably for a long time to come) 🙂

Ni!

[Lisa Wagner]

Hello Dale and welcome to the MLT Club 🙂 We hope you’ve already started to make yourself at home and checked out some of the Club’s content. We’re very happy to have you here!
If you’ve got any more questions, feel free to ask us over at the “ask the MLT” board (we’ll get back to your Woolgoose question there soon ♥ ) or send us a message to mlt-club@monalisa-twins.com
Stay groovy!

[Lisa Wagner]

Most of it are super old recordings that we found … sampled, stretched and twisted. We love the sound of those super early voice-recordings and they fitted perfectly with the sort of 1920’s/40’s feel we were going for with this song 🙂

[Lisa Wagner]

Oh, and I nearly forgot … it’s also the first thing you see in this video 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JnZBz0Zro

[Lisa Wagner]

Hi Rick,

It’s such a weird and wonderful guitar. We picked it up at a Vintage guitar shop in Dorsden/Germany before we started working on our “When We’re Together” album. It’s a 12 string, hollow-body Framus (old German guitar brand) with a tremolo and built-in damper built in the early 70’s. Such a unique instrument unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

Dad and I gave it a proper set up, polished it up a little and now it’s totally playable (At 00:51 you can see me and Dad working on it for a second https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzt0AtpcLaE). We used it for “Nothing Is In Vain” (you can hear it really well in the intro as well as spot it in the video) and “Won’t You Listen Now”, like you mentioned.

And it’s a song I’ve always sang lead on, in the Chorus anyway. For the verses we both sing so there isn’t really a “lead” there.

Hope that helps 🙂
Thanks for the questions!

[Lisa Wagner]

Well, we are able to answer that question to a T by looking at the original footage to see what we were discussing that very moment 😛 So … In the first clip, John just finished showing us some alternating fingerpicking bluegrass techniques (which he is really good at btw!). I go on to say that this technique is so much more interesting for accompanying yourself in comparison to plain old strumming. Mona then goes, “yeah, it makes you go from this (making a normal face) to this (making a smiley face).” That’s what John is laughing about 🙂 It was a sweet moment.

In the second clip he is playing a beautiful finger picking version of “Walk Right Back” and I am trying to remember who the song is by (Everly Brothers).
Tada, good to have the video evidence or I could have made up some more fantastical topics of conversation. But even crazier stories would have probably been true as he told us some pretty unbelievable tales from his past.

We’re glad to have some of it on video so if we get around to it, we might put some of it together for the club. Looking at the footage reminded us of all the great stories.

[Lisa Wagner]

Howard, tiny, dried up little buds from some gnarly, thorny bushes around the San Francisco hills surely still count as flowers, don’t they? It was hard to find the wild fresh daffodils and tulips there in the middle of summer 😉
A big thank you, I’m glad you like the video and recording!

[Lisa Wagner]

Holy cow, how did I only now see this? That is so cool!! Do I have to pop over to the studio to double check whether you stole my guitar? 😛 But seriously, that is quite impressive. When you posted the pictures of the bridge and tremolo I thought it was some pictures from the internet, not that you actually got them for your own Duo Jet.
That makes me really happy!Please tell me how you find it, whether you like the playability and sound. Also, how are you fixing the Bridge to the body? I used some double sided sticky tape to avoid it sliding around too much and for a while I stuck some black plastic pieces between the pickup and bridge to avoid my hand pushing it out of place. That was more so an issue when playing in hot & sweaty places like the Cavern so I’ve been fine without it for a while.
Also thanks again for the email with all the guitar specs! We got back to you there earlier today.