Session Log: 12.30.06

Saturday, 12.30.06: 1:00p - 6:30p
'R2' - Take 1 and Re-make
Studio: Miriam Audio - Philadelphia, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Jesse Honig

Tracks (in order):
* Maraccas
* Bongos
* Clave
* Loop made of above percussion tracks
* Acoustic Guitar
* Nylon-string Guitar #1
* Nylon-string Guitar #2
* Nylon-string Guitar #3
* Piano
* Tic-Tac Bass
* Half-speed Tic-Tac Bass
* Hofner Bass
* Electric 12-string Guitar

Another solo session - going in alone with Jesse manning the boards and doing the one-man band thing.

It's hard not to lose momentum during the holidays. The last two weeks of December are always tough to get anything done other than the big holiday rush. This year I went back to Michigan to see family and also spent a couple of days "up North" (it's a Michigan thing, look it up) at a friend's place on Lake Michigan. While I was there I wrote a new song called 'Three Weeks Shy' and was re-visited by a forgotten unfinished song from my past, which is this one, let's call it 'R2' for now.

Sessions like this one are some of my favorites, moving quickly from instrument-to-instrument putting down the ideas I hear inside my head (actually, I hear them more outside of my head, as if they're in the next room, but a psychiatrist told me once that that qualifies as auditory hallucinations and I might want to do something about that, so let's go with inside my head). Sometimes, I can get a bit too ahead of myself when I do this, and wind-up boxing myself into a corner I don't see until I'm pretty far down the road with the recording.

That happened today. I initially did a version of this starting with the acoustic guitars and working my way through the first Tic-Tac Bass track, THEN tried adding the hand-percussion. It wasn't happening. Essentially, the way I played the guitars didn't let the percussion breathe.

What I realized was I had to START with the percussion, build up a little loop (this is done by playing for a short duration of time, in this case I think it was 8 bars, and then copying and repeating or "looping" the part to the length you need) and then add the other instruments.

Was that I hear you say? You're asking me doesn't this technically break the rules I've laid down for the album about using full performances and no click tracks? Well, observant and troublesome blog reader, "yes" and "not exactly, but pretty much, for all practical purposes, yes". Maybe you should think of these as "guidelines" as opposed to "rules", maybe you should remember that rules are meant to be broken, maybe you should get the hell off my back, alright?

Anyway, starting over with the percussion first turned out to be ticket.

The nylon-string guitar parts I have hard panned left and right (#2 and #3 work together to form one part, they're both on the left) and I dig how they play off of one another. I've also got the Piano and Tic-Tac bass doubling same part and hard panned left and right - just playing a few notes in the verses, then taking a composed solo (that is to say, the notes were pre-arranged, not that it was calm and collected). I really like the sound of the piano playing single notes in the lower register combining with the sound of the Tic-Tac Bass (alright, since I've mentioned it three times now - a "Tic-Tac" bass is a special type of bass that has six-strings - and yes, I KNOW you all know how I feel about basses with more than 4 strings, but this is a completely different animal and it's okay - anyway, the strings are tuned an octave below the guitar, but it uses much thinner strings than a regular bass, giving it a kinda clicky, twangy sound. If you know the solo from 'Wichita Lineman' - and if you don't, you should - it's that sound. This is the most grammatically unruly parenthetical statement I've ever written and I'm truly sorry), and the hard-panning gives it a huge soundscape.

It was actually Jesse who suggested we try recording a second Tic-Tac bass track, this time recording at half-speed. This is another one of those fantastic old-school tape machine tricks that nobody does anymore in the digital recording world. It's exactly what it sounds like - you play the recording at half-speed, so that the previously recorded tracks are both twice as slow and an octave lower than normal, while you play or sing at normal pitch. Then, playing back the track at normal speed, the newly recorded track plays back twice as fast and an octave up from how you played it. Since the Tic-Tac has this strange half-bass, half-guitar quality to it anyway, this trick made it sound pretty much like an electric guitar but with a quality that's just a little bit different.

Anyway, a very productive 6 hour session that resulted in a backing track I'm in love with.

Bring on the New Year.

Session Log: 12.12.06

Tuesday, 12.12.06: 12:00p - 6:00p
'Listening to NRBQ' - basic track + keyboard solo overdub
Studio: Miriam Audio - Philadelphia, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Pete Donnelly

Today we began work on the only song on this album that I've already been playing out live - 'Listening to NRBQ'.

Songs are like kids - you don't have "favorites", except that you kinda do. I'm very fond of this one. It operates on a few different levels lyrically and is sort of the blueprint for the thing I'm trying to do with the lyrics on this album. This song is very personal, but in no way autobiographical, at least not in any way that anyone other than myself can figure out.

I've already cut a demo of this tune (hey Jake and Dan!) and the band played it at the Beta Hi-Fi Festival at World Cafe Live earlier in the year, so there was a lot less time needed to get the tune in shape, basically just a few run-throughs for everyone to remember the tune and we were ready to cut it.

But music is weird.

You have the basic requirements that you have to get together, everybody playing the right notes, playing in time, that sort of thing - and then there's . . . that other stuff. The thing that happens where it all coalesces into something beyond the notes being played. It's "feel", but it's also something else beyond that. And it's delicate and elusive. I think a lot of it has to do with the physical and mental state of the musicians playing and whether they get in sync (which is not to say 'N-Sync - no, let's not say that).

So here's how this session went. We came in and played for about four and a half hours, cutting multiple takes of the tune with everyone playing the right notes and it just went nowhere. It's such a frustrating thing, because there's nothing you can point to - "oh, if I just remember to play the B minor going into the bridge everything will come together" - it's just . . . "well, let's try another one." Maybe it was doing a daytime session - I know I was definitely struggling with low energy through a lot of it.

Some days you just have to accept that that's how it's gonna be and come back to fight another day. I thought we were maybe at that point, and Mike said "let's just try one more".

And then that magical thing happens where it all comes together and it was night and day from everything else we played earlier and we got the take and I love it. Everyone's playing is so alive and connected to each other, playing off of each other, taking it somewhere else.

So basically, we played really well for exactly four minutes and fifty-one seconds (the song won't be that long, but once it finally felt good we had to stay there for a while and vamp on the outro) of a six hour session. And because of that, it was a great day in the studio.

Music is weird.

Session Log: 12.06.06

Wednesday, 12.06.06: 4:00p - 10:00p
'You Won't Be Long' / 'Take It As It Comes'
Studio: Miriam Audio - Philadelphia, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Pete Donnelly

Mike, Roger, Pete, and I reconvene for another attempt at the backing tracks for the above tunes.

Listening to the rough mixes from the 11.30.06 session, I'm confident that 'Last Trip' is in the bag as far as the backing track goes. I'm still debating whether I like one of the takes all the way through or whether I want to edit between two takes, but one way or the other, we got it.

'You Won't Be Long' sounded as though we might have had it and we started the session by editing together pieces of a couple of takes from the previous session, but there was enough "well maybe that's it" going on to be worth taking another shot and I'm really glad we did.

We cut four new takes, marking Take 3 best through the end of the bridge and Take 4 best from there on out, though Take 4 may carry the day all by itself in the end. I'm really liking this one - it's got a nice, soaring kind of melody that switches between full voice and falsetto, really interesting changes in the drums in different sections, Mike's piano track has that great, old piano sound with a concise, structured solo, and Pete's bass playing is joyous and energetic and makes me smile. I also think there's a lot of room for a harmony vocal throughout and I'm thinking it might be a great place to have Mike Viola come in and have a moment on the record.

So now that we're feeling all good about ourselves, let's turn to 'Take It as It Comes'. As I thought, listening to the rough mixes of the 11.30.06 takes of 'TIaIC' finds us still searching for the right feel in a couple of places, most notably the verses. I had some ideas coming into the session and we dutifully chocked up an additional 9 takes of the tune. Every album has a problem child, and I think we've found this album's difficult birth. I don't know - it feels good, it feels not-so-good. This is a me problem, there's something in the arrangement I haven't figured out yet. More listening and thinking outside of the studio.

Session Log: 11.30.06

Thursday, 11.30.06: 8:00p - 2:00a
'You Won't Be Long' / 'Last Trip' / 'Take It As It Comes'
Studio: Miriam Audio - Philadelphia, PA
Producer: Jim
Engineer: Pete Donnelly

After spending the previous day rehearsing, this session saw the first true takes of the listed songs with myself on Acoustic Guitar, Pete Donnelly on Bass, Roger Cox on Drums, and Mike Frank on various keyboards (Piano on 'YWBL', Organ on 'LT', and Wurlitzer Electric Piano and Synth/Sampled Piano on 'TIaIC').

As with the couple of songs I started in earlier sessions on my own, the goal with these backing tracks is to get as many full or close to full performances as possible. As you might expect, this goes up a degree in difficulty with each additional musician playing at the same time. Still, several of the performances on this night had "the stuff" and are under consideration for use as the backing tracks for 'YWBL' and 'LT'. At this point, I think we're still finding our way with 'TIaIC",

In practice, what will probably happen is some editing between takes in each tune, but in a way that is much more in line with how people worked when recording on tape. This would involve making very simple edits that keep all of our performances together, but using different song sections from various takes. For example, taking the first verse through the first chorus of Take 3, then the second verse through the end from Take 5. To explain this a bit further to anyone not intimately involved with modern recording methods, but still interested enough to care (anyone?), the more modern digital hard-disk based recording method would usually involve going in with each individual musician and fixing any mistakes or replacing parts of a performance or - worse - actually sitting there at the computer terminal "chopping up" a performance and moving notes around to create a performance that no musician actually ever played. No, we don't want that.

Finally, we're still not using click tracks, so our performances not only have to be pretty consistent tempo-wise from the beginning to end of each performances (not speeding up or slowing down noticeably), but also must remain consistent from take to take, even after taking a break and coming back. Fortunately, listening to the rough mixes made at the end of the session leaves me confident that the type of macro-editing I'm looking to do won't be a problem.

The bottom line with all this kind of "work this way instead of that way" techno mumbo-jumbo is just trying to create a record that is more musical and has some breath and life in it.