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.