Real time

Another Nashville entry!

Thursday, April 24

Here's another shot of the amazing Steinway grand at RCA Studio B and the person who was lucky enough to get to play it. (Me! That's me!)

Did you notice that there's something draped over the lid of the piano?

That's an acoustic blanket. It enabled us to record in real time.

Back when we made Highways and Hiking Shoes, we laid down all the parts separately. The sequence went like this:

1. Ron recorded his drum tracks, along with my scratch vocals and scratch keyboard. (Scratch tracks are what you record to accompany the musicians laying down the real tracks. Without them, Ron would be playing by himself.
2. I recorded my piano parts while listening to Ron's drum tracks and my scratch vocals on headphones.
3. I recorded my vocals while listening to Ron's drums and my piano on headphones.

The point behind doing one part at a time is isolation. If something needs to be fixed after the recording sessions are over (which is going to happen unless you have all the time time in the world for recording, which we didn't), recording engineers can work their magic on that one part. While you have a more spontaneous feel when you throw down all the parts at once, it's difficult to impossible to fix (for instance) an off note in the vocals if you can't separate it from the drums and keys.

Hence the acoustic blankets. Producer Drew brought them to the studio to separate my vocal mic from the piano mic. If everything went according to plan, the vocals and piano wouldn't bleed into each other. (Producer Drew told us we should go back to Electric Kite Studio later to record additional vocals as a fallback, just in case everything didn't go to plan.)

The studio also had baffles, large wooden structures on wheels, to separate drums from the keyboard and vocals.

Recording in real time felt different than doing it studio-style. More immediate, more in the now. Ben, our recording engineer, had leaned toward this approach because he thought it would yield better energy.

I see what he means.

RCA Studio B

Hey, I promised you more posts about Nashville, didn't I. Sorry for the delay. I was waiting on some pics, and then came ME Awareness Day, and ... Well, at any rate, the Nashville tales resume here. All photos courtesy of Greg Stager.

Thursday, April 24

Historic RCA Studio B is where Elvis Presley recorded 60 percent of his hits. It's also where we just laid down a bunch of tracks.

In fact, the piano I played was the same one Elvis's pianists played.

The awe factor was pretty high going in. I expected ... I'm not sure, exactly. For there to be an aura about the place. For it to look like the kind of studio famous people used. But it seemed unassuming. That's the best word I can think of. It looked like any recording studio.

I mentioned this to Drew Raison, our producer, as he gave me a tour. Drew agreed. He said the entire neighborhood was like that—all these little studios with jaw-dropping history, housed in buildings that didn't call attention to themselves.

Once we settled in, I realized there was something kinda cool about the modest-ness of the rooms. Something neat about the idea that Elvis Presley came in here to work, and he wasn't surrounded by settings that existed to highlight how important he was. I imagined him stepping in, as we did, and saying, "Let's get 'er done."

We got a lot done in RCA Studio B tonight. I just hope our doings are worthy of those who came before us.

Back from Nashville

Wow. We're home.

What a trip.

We had good times and great opportunities. What we didn't have was secure Internet access, which meant that I couldn't blog events as they occurred. So I went old school. I bought a little notebook and scribbled accounts of our recording adventures with a ... what do you call those things? Oh, right, a pen. Over the next week or so, I'll edit my scribblings and post them more or less in chronological order.

Stay tuned.

April updates

Oh man. It's been two and a half months since I posted anything here. Oops.

In my defense, there's been a lot going on. Ron the Drummer and I are flying to Nashville on Wednesday to record a few songs. I'm psyched about it, obviously. I'm also scrambling to get everything into place so I can leave.

Then, three days after we get back, we'll be playing in the Tucson Folk Festival.

Our slot is Saturday, May 3, 2 p.m., at Old Town Artisans. Come see us! Bring your 50 best friends!

More updates as events warrant, hopefully sooner than 2.5 months from now.

Fade to 2011

As every December draws to a close, I try to think of a goal for the next year. Something challenging but doable. This year I can't think of a thing. There's the usual one, where I say I'll write at least four songs, but that's it.

I didn't even come close to achieving 2010's non-songwriting goal, which was to find Cinder Bridge's audience. I barely even tried. Little day-to-day tasks overwhelmed me. I've barely had time to practice, and I pushed any activities that didn't come with a clear roadmap off to the side, where they lay forgotten.

I haven't done anything to promote us. I haven't even been blogging regularly for the last four months.

Do I have nothing at all to show for 2010?

Feeling disheartened, I opened up GarageBand around 11 p.m. and loaded a song that Ron and I recorded in his living room. I've wanted to apply a fadeout to this song for some time, but kept procrastinating because I didn't know how to use the fadeout feature and GarageBand's help documentation looks like this:

To add a manual fade-in or fade-out:

Click the disclosure triangle in the track’s header, or, for the master track, choose Track > Show Master Track.

Choose the volume curve in the menu in the track’s header.

Add control points to the beginning of the volume curve for a fade-in, or to the end of the curve for a fade-out.

Move the control points to adjust the length and intensity of the fade-in or fade-out.

It doesn't look so hard until you actually try to do it, and then you discover that nothing in the interface looks like a disclosure triangle, and in fact you do not know what a disclosure triangle is, or why anybody would call something a disclosure triangle. Also, what is a volume curve, and how do you choose it? Who writes these things?

But I pressed on, because there was less than an hour left until midnight, and by god I was going to accomplish SOMETHING before 2010 was over.

One Google search for better directions later, followed by a little experimentation, and I had my fadeout.

So there you go, 2010. Don't say I never gave you anything.

Happy new year!

Preproduction

For the past few weeks, Ron the Drummer and I have been making scratch recordings of some songs that we think might work for our new album. Today we sent the last of them off to our producer. He will listen and tell us which ones he thinks are good enough for the album.

Oh, did I mention that we're making a new album?

Yeah.

Though this has been in the works for a while, I've been reluctant to say anything here. I don't want to jinx it. A small, irrational part of me really believes that if I announce it publicly, everything will fall apart.

But it's time. I initially told myself that I'd go public when we started the evaluation recordings. Then, when the recordings were underway, I decided I'd post after we started sending them to the producer.

He has all of them now. So: we're making a new album.

Did I mention that we're making a new album?

Dream analysis

In my last post I mentioned that the guy who produced our album a few years back is now doing work on "Everybody Knows About Me." For those of you who tuned in after May 12, it's about someone living with undiagnosed CFIDS/ME, and I wrote it with the vague intention of using it to raise awareness about this illness. We recorded the demo here in Tucson, then sent it to Producer Drew in Philadelphia to let him know what we were up to. Down with the cause, Drew promptly offered to mix the song down and get more instrumentation together for it -- all for free.

On Monday we got word that we would have a first draft of the new arrangement Real Soon Now. I was psyched. And scared. There's something nerve-racking about people throwing down tracks for your song without you even being there. Still, this has worked for us before. It's the way we got our album produced, and that turned out pretty freakin' well. So I've done the best I can to keep my inner control freak under control, mostly by trying not to think about it.

Tuesday morning, I dreamed that the new recording arrived. The piano intro was different. It wasn't bad -- had an interesting Bruce Hornsby vibe to it -- but didn't sound remotely like what I'd written. Then the vocals began, and they weren't mine either. Some guy was singing. I surmised that this was all done for the good of the song. Before I decided whether I liked the results, I woke up.

Believe it or not, I really have been good about not dwelling on my little anxieties as the wait continues. If I can just avoid sleeping until the real recording arrives, I'll be fine.