Friday, December 5, 2008

A Rock and Roll Miracle

Blog entries have slowed to a crawl lately, but the efforts and results of scene stalwarts “Black and Blue” have continued to progress at a lightning fast pace. Witness the activities of this past weekend, where Bill and I cranked out an unprecedented four recordings. And I’m talking about serviceable, album quality recordings.

I arrived at Bills place, er, I mean the Torrance Recording Studio promptly at noon. Bill and I tooled around for a bit, and ultimately decided to head out to Carl’s Jr. for our traditional pre-recording chow-down. With Bill having recently kicked the signature band addition to diet coke, he was sporting a bottle of “fizzy”, to accompany Munson’s perpetually brandished super slurpee cup filled with “still”. I’m talkin’ ‘bout water, mind you. We strategized the course for the day, and even wrote out a project plan.

The purpose of this studio session was really to prepare and lock down tracks and mixes for the upcoming holiday single. About a month ago, Bill and I hatched the plan to put out a single for Christmas. Cuz you know, the fans are clamoring for music and all. Well, not really. Our original fantasy was to have the album out by Christmas, as Bill was highly enamored by the idea of handing out CD’s as presents. But as the year wore on, and Christmas drew closer, we realized that we still had a significant time investment to make in the album in order to get it mixed properly. So while we had stayed on track by recording one song per month, we haven’t really done any mixing yet. But I thought the notion of handing out CDs for Christmas was a good one, so we decided to do a single.

The original concept for the single was this: feature one album song, and back it up with 2 b-sides. The alt.tunes would be recorded live in the studio, one take, no overdubs. Kind of like Trujillo’s “Live Bands In The House” project. Well, just like it, in fact. I thought it would be cool to do the one voice, one guitar format for the two b-sides. Bill does one, I do one. I sort of thought of this as a multiple birds, one stone approach. Not only would we get studio quality recordings of some songs which we may have otherwise not recorded, but we would also be putting tracks on the CD that were otherwise not album bound. My feeling was that it would be a shame to dump three album worthy songs on the CD single. Felt like we would be giving away too much.

Bill initially singed off on this concept, though when the day came, he faltered. But more on that later,

So at Carl’s we planned out the day. First order of business was to do a solid mix of “Second Time Around”, the song we had both agreed would be our first single. STA is that song that just came together more beautifully than either of us expected. We did a lot of experimenting on that song, tried a lot of new stuff, and it just all worked. One of the things I recall Bill commenting on after the completion of the MNI album was how surprised he was at how some songs turned out good, whereas others did not. What was surprising is that it had nothing to do with the song itself. That is to say, some great songs turned out just OK, whereas a weaker song may have turned out great. I think this is that mythical “synergy” thing that you hear about in business presentations. Some times, things/forces just come together at unexpected times to deliver a result that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Well, in my opinion, STA is one such song. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a really good song. But the recording made it a great song. Go figure.

We needed to mix that down, and lock it down. We had some technical problems to overcome, namely that we need to consolidate our individual efforts onto one project. I had spent lots of time performing surgery on the various tracks. This amounted to removing background chatter, snapping up some timing on a few pieces of vocal dissonance, and also patching up a few drum flubs. Bill had invested time tweaking volume levels, adding effects, and doing some equalization. So we needed to bring those things together into one.

Next on the list was recording our b-sides. Then we had to mix them down.

In column B of the list was a few logistical issues to attend to. We needed to have a final intel-gathering session on CD single pricing, and make some decisions. We had to take some photos for the back cover, and also to discuss some concepts for artwork for the cover.

With our best plans laid, we headed back to the garage.



The consolidation of data for STA went off without a hitch. In fact, it was really quite easy. The mix down was fairly unproblematic, with a few good laughs coming from an overly loud ethereal track from Bill. I suppose one of the best things to come out of the mix down was the sharing of CuBase knowledge. I’ve blogged before about the awesomeness of this tool, and about how we are only scratching the surface of its functionality. Between Bill and I, we only know a very small percentage of its feature set, though our knowledge is not 100% overlap. This means that Bill knows a few tricks I don’t know, and I know a few tricks that Bill doesn’t. Through the mix down process, Bill and I managed to exchange a lot of knowledge on the application, and I thought that was really cool.



Satisfied with our mix down, it was time to start recording our B-Sides. This is kind of where it all went to hell. And I say that humorously. Bill (naturally) had an alternate agenda for his B-side, and used his typical tricks of misdirection and ham-handed diplomacy to try to get his way. His vision was to record his song acoustically, but with drums. Though sort of defeating the entire purpose, I naturally caved to the age old Fischer born mantra of “Let’s try it”. Cuz worst case, it’s rock and roll. I recorded “I’m Not The Type” very quickly. It was just a vocal mic, a guitar mic, and the guitar line. I did four takes. Take 2 was good, but I thought I could do better. Take three was aborted about 2/3 through due to a wrong chord, and take four was the keeper.

Now it was Bill’s turn to record his song, called “Come My Way”.



Yeah, I know. Believe me, I had fun with that song title too, so do your best.

Speaking of synergy, brace yourselves. So Bill sets himself up at the mic, and gets ready. I’m at the drums with one overhead mic hooked up. No kick mic, no snare. We run through the song once, just for practice, and I swear to you, it sounds like it’s ready for the album. It’s a nice little song with a couple of really strong refrains. Very strong lyrical imagery too. I was not only impressed by the song, but was doubly impressed by the way we performed it. And I’m not trying to suggest that it was my drumming that “made” the song. I was just doing my typical bag of drum tricks, with a couple little flourishes thrown in. It wasn’t the drums. It was everything working together. Really just stunning, and I must confess, was one of the brightest spots in an excellent year of recording.

So now the gears are really starting to spin in my head, and I start to get committed (internally, that is) to the idea of getting this song on the album. A little arm twisting and a couple of takes later, and I think I sold Bill on the idea. Before we could lose momentum, I grabbed the bass and threw together a Bass line. Got it in one take. Bill later commented that he thought it was the best bass line yet to come out of this whole album. Or maybe he said it was the bass line that fit best with a song. Or something like that. Either way, it was very kind words for what was a minimal effort. Synergy.

Bad news for Bill is that he now had to find another song to record. He ended up on a nice little 12 bar blues number. I forget the name, but it’s something about being a guitar player. VERY traditional blues, in every sense of the word. I thought it was really fantastic, as that is something no incarnation of the band has ever really done. Well, not as an original. Though we played “Spider and the Fly” a few times, I hardly think that counts.

Bill did a couple of takes and nailed it. Feeling so inspired by the success of “Come My Way”, I requested a recording with drums. We tried it twice, but the ending never seemed to time out quite right. I have to say the song sounded great though!

With recording duties finished, we went in for mix downs. We pulled apart the recording project file and broke it down into separate files, one for each song. The acoustic songs mixed together very quickly, without any hassle. We also put together a quick mix of “Come My Way”, even though it is not destined to appear on the single.

We re-visited the mix of STA, only to learn that it sounded very “tinny” in comparison to the acoustic tracks. So we tweaked it a bit, and decided we were happy.

Photos were taken, album covers were discussed, and our intel gathering visit to the CD duplication website produced great results. We settled on getting a run of 100 disks for about 400 bucks shipped. The 1000 disk run would have cost us about 1000 bucks, and would not have been here in time for Christmas. So while we lose a lot on the per-disk basis, we make up for it in speed to customers. Combined with the fact that we’re STILL sitting on hundreds of copies of the first MNI album, I’m thinking the small run approach might be best anyway.



I left the studio just after 8:00, after a full day of fun and synergy. Over the next couple of days, it’s imperative that I wrap up the artwork for the single, output the final mix downs, and author a CD for production. The short run CD duplication service offers a 5 day turn around, so there’s a little more breathing room. But there’s still a lot of work to be done in a short amount of time. Better get to it!

Update: I put in a request to register www.blackandbluemusic.com this morning. This will hopefully be the new online home for Black and Blue. Not that we had an old home. But you know what I mean.

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