Session Log: 'Somebody to Love'

Friday, 10.20.06: 4p - 10:30p
Somebody to Love
Studio: Kawari Sound - Jenkintown, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Adam Winokur

Tracks (in order):
* Acoustic guitar - main accompaniment
* 4 acoustic guitars (unused) - solo
* 48 tracks of BG Vocals - Intro through end of 2nd chorus. (mostly 8 voices each on 4 separate parts, but sometimes with 2 additional 8 voice parts)

________________________________

Saturday, 10.21.06: 2p - 11:00p
Somebody to Love
Studio: Kawari Sound - Jenkintown, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Adam Winokur

Tracks (in order):
* 48 tracks of BG Vocals - Bridge through end. (mostly 8 voices each on 4 separate parts, but sometimes with 2 additional 8 voice parts)

________________________________

Sunday, 10.22.06: 2p - 3:00a
Somebody to Love
Studio: Kawari Sound - Jenkintown, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Adam Winokur

Tracks (in order):
* Electric Guitar - solo and single note in third verse.
* Lead Vocal
* Handclaps - 16 tracks. 8 Left, 8 Right

Mix


I love doing stuff like this. I was asked to submit a recording of a song from 1976 for Helen Leicht's 30th Anniversary in radio. Helen has been at Philadelphia's WXPN for the past several years and has been a great supporter. I was actually having trouble coming up with a song - everything I thought of turned out to be either '75 or '77 - and I was telling Jesse Honig about it when we were recording 'Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)'. As we were prowling around his iTunes library he came upon this one and basically said something to the effect of "you should do this, because it's impossible" - which it really seemed to be, so I just kinda laughed it off.

Then a couple days later it started nagging at me, so I tried recording just the intro at home one night. At first I tried doing 4 voices on each of the 4 harmony parts. It sounded alright and I was at least was a bit encouraged that I could actually figure out the parts, but it was also obvious that Freddie was singing 8 voices on each part.

When I tried to record the remainder of the parts I hit a snag - this is a bit techy, but I'll give you the quick and dirty version (or at least, or longest, the one paragraph version).

Unfortunately, almost no one records on tape anymore - it's too rare and expensive and the machines cost too much to maintain. So, there are a number of computer-based recording software programs that folks use to record with and one called ProTools which is by far the most ubiquitous. On top of that, there are three different levels of ProTools, of which I have the middle one and that was the problem: With so many tracks (I was already up to 32 - my limit - and that wasn't even all of the background vocals), there was no way my system could handle it.

Luckily, Adam Winokur was running a top of the line ProTools rig over at Kawari Sound in Jenkintown, PA and was available to help. This was great too, because it freed me up from having to engineer and I could just concentrate on figuring out parts and singing. Then figuring out more parts and more singing. Then figuring out even more parts and . . . you get it. All told, I sang about 6 hours on Friday, 8 on Saturday and 4 on Sunday. Even I don't sing that much. Except I did.

Amazingly, the sessions, though really intense (Adam said it was like an aerobics class for running ProTools), seemed to me to be pretty painless and there was never a point when I thought we wouldn't get it done. We did face some challenges, though.

The first day we almost couldn't get started because we ran into all sorts of problems just getting my iPod to work so I could listen to the original to figure out the parts. Got it out - it was dead. Looked in my bag for my charger - didn't have it. Found a charger on the 2nd floor of the studio - wrong connector. Finally found a cable that worked to charge it - couldn't find the right cable to export the file. This was all my fault and took about 2 hours to deal with.

Once we were up and running the first acoustic went down in about 2 takes. I liked the idea of the accompaniment just being an acoustic guitar, then having all these background vocals on top of it. That way, when people said it was over the top (hey, it's Queen, how could it NOT be over the top) I could say "What? It's just acoustic guitar and vocals". So, at first I was going to play the solo on acoustic. Here's the thing: Brian May is a sick mothershutyourmouthheyI'mjusttalkinboutShaft. I was able to get most of the solo, but the last line - after the fast ascending run - the REALLY fast part - is buried under (would you believe it?) a ton of background vocals and I couldn't make it out. We even tried slowing down the original recording by 2 whole steps (which is a lot) and it was still too fast to make out what he was playing.

I have no real pride about my guitar playing and I know when I'm licked. So, I called up Kevin Hanson, 'cause that boy can play. He even knows what Mixolydian means and maybe even how to spell it. I asked him if he'd cut the solo for me at his place and he was nice enough to do it. But then when we tried to place it in our version the tempo didn't quite match (I'm still not sure why that was). I also noticed that Kevin wasn't playing that last line the same way, either. I called him and he said "yeah, that's buried under a bunch of background vocals and I can't make it out - I just played fast!" Well, that kinda freed me - I figure anything Kevin does is cleared by the guitar gods - so on the third day of recording I tried it again - this time on electric playing through a tiny toy Marshall amplifier and it sounded alright and both funny and yet kinda like a Brian May tone, so I just went for it. Still Kevin, you rule and I appreciate you pitching in.

After giving up on the acoustic solo idea, I just sang background vocals for 6 hours. That was day one.

Day two was just an eight hour session of nothing but background vocals. The challenge that day came before the session - Adam had a car accident. He was fine, the folks in the other vehicle that hit him were fine, his car . . . R.I.P.. It's an amazing testament to Adam that he still came and did the session.

The third day I was a bit worried that I wouldn't have any voice left for singing the lead vocal after doing all the backgrounds, but it was actually there and we were able to get it down. The lead vocal was actually harder to figure out than the backgrounds. I don't know about you, but there are parts of records that I'm really drawn to and other parts just seem to come along for the ride. For me, 'Somebody to Love' has always been about the background vocals and the guitar solo and, to be fair, two of the drum fills (we almost put them in - right at the beginning and after the second line of the guitar solo - JUST those two fills). Anyway, when I went to sing the lead I realized that I had NO IDEA how a lot of it went. So that was a challenge.

Into the home stretch we hit our final snag. At this point, we had the acoustic, the bg voxes, the guitar solo and the lead vox (plus a couple of reverb tracks done the old fashioned way - by sticking a speaker at the bottom of a stairwell, sending sound through it, then placing a mic at the top of the stairs and recording the sound bouncing around. We used it on the lead vocal and the electric guitar.). All that was left were the handclaps. 16 tracks of them. It was as we were recording these tracks the Adam's top of the line ProTools HD system running on his Quad-Core G5 (a ridiculous amount of processing power) said "Um, NO! Do not pass Go. I will not record anymore." Adam was astonished, because when they got the system everyone told them they'd never run into this. "How do you like working with me now, Adam?" was basically my response. There's an even more arcane technical explanation of how Adam was able to solve this problem that I'm not even going to try to explain - Let's leave it at "hats off to Adam".

Claps done, we mixed. I really think Adam and I got the balances and pannings down which really adds a lot to the vocals sounding right. At the end of the night (or the middle of the morning) we had it and I'm really pleased with it. I hope you like it, too.

Are you exhausted after reading this?

Good. Now it's like you were there.