Stop all the Poppin'!!!

This past Sunday, which I guess was the 26th of April, Bill and I got together for some rock and roll fun. Seems that we are both seriously missing the good ol' days of recording one song per month, so we thought we would give it a try.

With the obligatory dorking around with the kids taken care of early, we headed into the studio. (For the sake of full disclosure, I should point out that it was actually pretty fun playing in the back yard with Bill's kids. They are all very cool kids, and with the new back yard in place, there's all kinds of room for scooter rides and wheelies).

We fell into "jam" mode, and ran through a few oldies before coming up with the idea of recording "King Of The Road". I think we were both feeling sort of uninspired, or maybe we just forgot how many songs we knew. Bill dragged out a very old copy of "High Tides and Hot Sh!ts", which at one time stood as the sum of all stickmen knowledge. Now it just makes for an interesting trip down memory lane.

We ran through KOTR a few times, and it was sounding good. I think we were getting to a point where we were ready to record. Then lunacy struck! I forget who started it, but we basically started playing a game of lyric swap. Bill would play the music for a song, such as Nothing Special, and I would sing the lyrics to Spontaneous Human Combustion, but using a new melody. Bill switched to piano, and I picked up a guitar, and we must have done that for about two hours. It was a lot of fun, and had us doing a lot of laughing.

Naturally, I'm telling this story out of order. I totally forgot the part where we re-recorded the guitar solo for "Friend That I Once Knew". I don't know what went wrong the first time we recorded it using Coca-Cola, but it was all out of pitch. So I re-did it using the Les Paul. While Bill voiced his disappointment over Coca-cola not making an appearance on the album, I believe that sadness was trumped by the fact that we now had a serviceable recording of the solo. Nice.

Bill of course switched into "can we try it" mode (as usual) and produced a stunning piece of musical comedy using only a guitar. I don't know exactly what the methodology is for producing this effect, but he basically played the same solo I had recorded, but down two frets. This created a very "Hotel California" style solo which has us both doubled over from laughter. Good stuff Bill! I would have been up for recording it, but I think it just sounded SO off the wall that we didn't bother. It did sound cool though. Don't get me wrong.

We made a trip to Carl's (Natch) with full Fischer Family in tow. Not quite a Black and Blue first, but the fact that we all stayed there together for the entire meal was indeed a first. Good stuff too. Will and Erika are absolute riots, and I had them saying "I want to rock!!!" all day long. Very inspiring! The fact that they are already comfortable behind instruments (though not terribly proficient) certainly bodes well for the oft-imagined "MNI Mark II". Children, the future is yours.

But today was REALLY supposed to be all about mixing. Though we got distracted with play time and recording and jamming, we did spend a bunch of time listening to and commenting on the current batch of mixes. Overall, the reviews are positive, but with constructive criticisms and ideas along the way. You know, a little more volume here, bring up the drums there, drop out the tambourine here, etc. The overall conclusion is that we're both quite happy with where things are going, though it's just not going fast enough ;) With my aggressive travel schedule and Bills family committments, it's hard to find time to really sit down and just crank out a few songs. But it will happen!!!

To spice up this post, I do have a few photos to show.

First up is the popper stopper we purchased a couple of months ago. The impetus for this was a botched vocal track for "On The Road" which was rendered useless by a couple really loud pops on the "Purchase Price of happiness" line. We had the choice of the standard "panty hose" style stopper, or this metal one. Having worked with the former previously, I can tell you first hand that they usually smell pretty awful. I guess the saliva of the singer tends to gather in there, and it doesn't come out. So after a few weeks of use, it smells like month old bad breath. Nasty. Thanks, but no thanks. While the metal one cost a few more bucks, I figure that will add to its longevity, and also prevent said malodorous eminations.



And here's the man himself, Bill Fischer, standing next to his boom-stack.



Also noteworthy of this session is the fact that Bill had prepared a timeline of the past year, documenting in an executive summary form the work we accomplished through 2008 and into 2009. Good stuff, band historian! You go!!!!

I think our next meeting will really focus on listening to the next round of mixes, and seeing how they sound in different listening situations. We've targeted two different cars, and iPod, and the monitor speakers in Bills den. Er, I mean his recording studios. My main goal for the next couple of weeks is to work on normalizing the volumes across all the songs, and ironing out the last couple technical tweaks. If I had to estimate, I would say we are more than fifty percent done with mixdown chores.

Safe.

Dormer Daze

Not quite a foom, though it could be.

The ‘Splosion Continues

Tonight turned out to be a very productive night for me as far as mixing goes. I did another round of mixes of almost every song on the album. I’ve been using an iterative methodology for song development, and it has served me well so far. Here’s the basic strategy:

1. Put together a mix of the song, to the best of my abilities
2. Load it onto the iPod
3. Listen to it a bunch of times, taking notes along the way about things that I think could be improved upon.
4. Go back into cubase and make the changes that my notes suggest
5. goto 2

I find that listening to the songs on the iPod, outside of the context of the mixing “studio” gives me a lot of insight that I don’t often get while “in the zone”. Turns out that sitting in front of the computer for a few hours at a time tends to dull your senses somehow. Having the songs on an iPod lets me listen to the songs anywhere, and also I can hear them up against other artists songs.

For me, I think the most fun part about this process is finding and fixing the technical glitches. I should probably call them performance glitches, seeing as how the technology actually had no part of it. For example, one of the things I fixed today were a couple of flubbed drum fills on Girl # 134. Throughout the song, there are about 10 drum fills. Three of them were pretty clumsy. Not terrible, just not as smooth as the others. A trick I recently discovered involves transplanting “working” parts over to the “damaged” parts. Works like a charm, but sometimes the grafts don’t fit quite perfectly, so I need to do a little stretching or reorganizing. I’ve gotten good enough at it that I can do it pretty quickly, and it also sounds very convincing. I also did a little lyrical fixing in The Friend That I once Knew. One of the common problems I find in our songs is that the vocal performances won’t match perfectly. On a lot of the songs, Bill and/or I lay down multiple takes. On “Friend”, I have two takes that play simultaneously. I find that the difference in performances makes for an interesting sound. However, there were a few lines that I just sang a little differently. I have created a technique to cut up the individual sounds and words so that I can line them all up visually, allowing the performance to be changed to sync up perfectly. It’s kind of weird, and something that just wouldn’t be possible using the type of equipment that we used when recording our first album. It’s wild.

Anyhow, there was a laundry list of little technical fixes that I got done, including tightening up the very final deedles on “Rockville”. The thing I like about the fixes is that they are very subtle. It’s not like there’s a glaring patch over the recorded work. In fact, if I did my job right, you’d never even notice it was done.

The punch line to all of this is that I think I have finished all of the technical fixes for the entire album. Of course, I’ll need to go through another iteration of listening, but I’m feeling confident that I’ve captured them all. I’ll leave room for a couple sneaky ones that may have slipped through the cracks, but it’s really come a long way.

In other news, I listened to the entire “album” in one sitting today. In fact, I was sitting out by the pool and tore through the whole album. Mixing issues aside, I think it’s a really solid album. There isn’t a song on there that I’m not proud of.

Oh, I also broke down and swapped out my vocals for Bills on “Let Me Be Your Guitar Playah”. Tough pill to swallow, to be sure, as that song is shaping up to be one of my favorite songs on the album, if not THE favorite song. Still, it sounds really good with Bill’s vocal, so it’s not like it’s a total loss. Hah!!

I’ve got another trip planned soon, and I will use my travel time to listen to the songs and write another todo list for my next iteration.