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.