10.24.22

    Over the past few months I've been producing a kind of niche release for a friend, taking Friday afternoons and weekends to paste together all the moves that comprise an album. I can't say much about it until it's released but it was another fantastic learning curve, especially because of how simple the concept and instrumentation was. I can say it involved classical guitar with a couple simple overdubs and solos and the challenge was how to make it feel immediate and vital. I think those two words go a long way when you're fiddling with all the technical minutiae and thousands of little mouse-clicks that happen during any session.

    As ever, toward the end, there would be some minor hand-wringing over milliseconds and specific timbres and a few instances of all-caps text-yelling, but I typically accept those elements as part of the process. It shows that somebody cares about what they're releasing and willing to fight for it. I've recorded lots of people who were too cool for all that and it showed in every aspect of the recording, where there was the ongoing assumption that I had a magic plugin to turn them in My Bloody Valentine when they recorded through a single tube Schwartz amp. It's all learning curves. I've never done a project without one, but I like to keep it simple and simple means "How does this sound when all is said and done."

    The truth is, an experienced engineer is going to mix your album better with stock plugins than "that one friend of ours" can manage with an arsenal of boutique analog emulators. It takes years to feel it out, to learn the vernacular and aspects of relationships between different signal paths. I still say that I'm not "there", wherever there is, but I know a big part of that process is turning off your mind and asking what the tracks need instead of trying to prove to yourself that you can use a DAW in clever ways.

   This all started when I was very young. I remember being enchanted by anything that could copy a sound and play it back. A miniature hand-held tape machine for instance; wherein you could adjust the playback speed and make all sorts of hilarious characters that entertained friends...but I didn't work with anything remotely multi-track oriented until I had my first $125 Tascam 4-track; a frustrating little toy compared to what I use today, but I still strive to keep things simple. I had drum machines and digital 8-tracks and crummy computers and finally, projects studios that functioned as studios should, with acoustic treatments and mono sources etc. You build up foundations and never really stop learning, especially with the pace of today's technology.

   This last project put us in the living room up against high ceilings and windows for the main stereo takes. It sounded natural. Woody. It also didn't hurt that he was playing on a $10k Martin, but the mixing process was fairly smooth. For the first time I was able to keep the data points running together in a linear way, which comes from being more and more organized (which comes from a selfish aversion to extra chaos) It also results from realizing that recording and creative artistry are two different things. Artists rarely understand this and it took me some time as well. Being a photographer, I see the parallels here and there. For instance, the beginner makes the mistake of thinking he's taking a picture of his feelings. Then, he sees the work of someone who stakes out landscapes obsessively and wakes up at 4:30 and hikes to a specific location with all the accumulated gear and takes five hundred shots of one scene, with the intent of doing multiple stacks in Photoshop etc. The beginner scratches his head and says "Oh well, I'm only doing it for fun anyway, or in a fit of demoralization they quit and move on to the next temporary hobby. The truth is that these two approaches are just very different.

    What I can say about all of this is that art is not always fun. Sometimes, it's just something you show up to. Sometimes you get lucky, but there's a built-in humbling aspect to it that will test a lot of people's egos, patience, and nerves. I still get upset, but I'm better at completing more tasks with an objective detachment before those moments occur (which are usually export translation problems at this point.)

    What I can say about the process itself is that I used a minimum processing with a handful of trusted tools and spent a lot more time in the "front of the house" i.e. correct positions, phasing, and initial routes and staging through the preamps. I love this Art PRO MPA II because of the impedance control. When the artist offered to bring another mic in to try, I pointed to the unassuming box beneath my monitor and said "See that knob right there? That lets me turn this mic into 50 other mics." Not exactly true, but true enough for our purposes and finally, finally everything is routed the way I want. No esoteric experimental mumbo jumbo that might allow me to take credit for some lucky mistake in the future but a solid path from A to B to C. 

   Lastly, it's true (at least in my case) that you're better off learning the monitors you have. I have three options, all vastly different in response, but the range is broad enough to receive all the information I need to press "export" with full confidence, knowing I don't have to take mixes to cars and send files to ask friends what they think. That sounds silly, but for me at 42, doing this for about 20 years now, it's like a yolk slowly lifting off my neck. It's part of the broader picture that occurs through osmosis: years on stage doing the bombastic raw emotion thing and paring it all down to calculated logic was always a difficult proposition, but all I can say is that the lessons keep coming and we walked away with a very fine album.