Track Lighting -or- Session One with Plumerai

Part I. The Prep

My on-call rotation (for work) ended on Thursday night at 11:59pm. It had been a bad (busy) week of on-call with lots of pages in the middle of the night, and it had been relentless since July 4, 2005. This happens sometimes; if I recall, my last on-call rotation was so quiet I wasn’t sure if my pager was broken! Not this time around! A backup library had failed. There was a mail problem. Another server had died. There were various other problems. It meant that by week’s end, I was exhausted. And I hadn’t had a chance to bring any of the studio gear downstairs.

This was a concern of mine, and tremendously embarassing — for a variety of reasons — since not being prepared is a good way to have a recording session go straight to hell.

1. We didn’t have that much time to coax out a single for the record label, which we’d also use as an audition for another festival (I think it’s for a festival, at least).
2. We had committed all band members to appearing for the session, and I hadn’t arranged for people to stay around for a second day. Thus, everything just had to “work” in one day.
3. This was my first time recording the band, and I’d heard all the stories of their previous recording sessions, most of which hadn’t gone well, or at least hadn’t resulted in the product they’d been looking for.
4. I had been acutely interested in engineering our recordings, so this was kind of my “audition”, too.

To hopefully mitigate these issues, I’d suggested that Martin and James come down on Friday night. Of all the instruments in a band, drums take the most time to setup. They’d need to be reassembled in the drum room — in a configuration best-suited for James’ playing style. Then everything would need to be mic’ed up to both get the optimal configuration for sound and to keep the mics out of the way of James’ drumsticks.

Further, I’d asked Loud Joe to come down and co-engineer the track. Since I’d felt I’d be playing bass during the performances we’d be tracking, it made sense not to try and operate the board whilst trying to focus on not throwing off everybody else’s performances. Since Martin uses a lot of effects on his guitar, it is near-impossible to overdub the guitar parts (barring a complex configuration where we’d send all of the guitar effects through an auxiliary bus so that they’d be separate from the “dry” guitar we’d put to track), so Martin’s guitar needed to be recorded live while James laid down the drum tracks. Thus, it seemed like laying down scratch bass tracks would make the most sense. And it justified having another person around to help with the engineering process.

James, Martin, and I loaded their gear into my car on Friday night. Then we went to get Loud Joe. As has been all too frequently the case this year, we did so in a downpour. Thankfully, the Red Sox were out of town this weekend, go it was a relatively easy task to pickup Joe from his apartment near Fenway Park. After a treacherous drive up 93N, we decided to stop for Chinese food. My town, Salem, NH, is the gateway to culinary heaven, so finding great food was easy. Alright, that was a lie. Salem, NH has barely any good restaurants, so we sat and ate at this pretty awful Chinese place.

When we finally got to my place at 9:30pm or so, after yet another death-defying drive in awful weather, there was much to do. I had to take care of the dog. Loud Joe hadn’t been aware that I’d not been able to move anything downstairs, and he was frustrated (justifiably so) with the amount of work that would have to be done before we’d get started. The drum room had to be fully reconfigured. People were cranky and tired, and I was starting to feel stress, which I’m usually able to diffuse, but it wasn’t working this time.

Loud Joe and I made a plan of action as to what should be setup first as James started to get the drums configured. Loud Joe and I brought the initial gear downstairs and then it was decided he’d set everything up while I brought the rest downstairs. By 11:30pm, all of the studio stuff was setup, and I’d done an initial mic configuration on the drums. We did a simple level check and called it a night. We’d configure headphone routing and deal with the guitar on Saturday.

Part II. The Breakfast

As is always the case with Plumerai, we sought out (and found) the worst breakfast for our dollar, consumed it, and returned to my house with hopes of getting started with recording by 11am.

Part III. The Session

Kerry would be arriving later, so we’d need to be well into the recording process by then. If we didn’t have guitar and drum tracks well underway by her arrival, there’d have been no chance of us being able to do the vocal tracks on Saturday.

When we’d returned after breakfast, it was about 10:15am. Everybody kicked into gear, and we’d started rehearsing “Sterile” by 11am. Oh, and did I explain that we’d decided to shorten the song, so we’d be practicing our changes while we recorded? Yeah, there you go. Peril was definitely a possibility here.

We ran through and recorded “Sterile” 3-4 times with our changes. It wasn’t sounding too bad. In fact, after about the 5th or 6th take, I felt that we were beginning to click. Plus, when we’d listened back to what we’d put on track, it was sounding clean and solid. I was pretty sure that things would take shape. This was a relief!

Kerry arrived by noon, and she’d started to listen in on what we’d been doing. Through her education at Berklee, Kerry is well-versed in recording and performance. Having her at the session at this early stage was a major bonus. She made some suggestions about what was working and what wasn’t working and gave an honest assessment of the performances we’d captured on track.

From all of this, we’d ended up with (what we’d believed to be) three good performances. After we’d listened back, we’d ended up with two good performances, as our ears (or our recollection) had deceived us on performance #2. Performance #2 was promptly eradicated. We decided to try 3-4 more takes of “Sterile” since we’d gotten one performance that we’d really liked.

We nailed it on performance #6. So, we were down to two performances: performance #1 and performance #6. Performance #1 was more like a live rendition of “Sterile” in the sense that the song grooved like it would when played live. Performance #6 was better technically. We purged all of the other performances except for performance #1 and performance #6.

Loud Joe suggested that we track “scratch” vocals for performances #1 and #6. This would be a guide as to which performance we’d pursue as our single.

Based on what Kerry laid down, it was determined that overdubs (the track we’d use, then) would be done against performance #6.

Part IV. The Pancakes

One of the major selling points of me joining Plumerai was the prospects of Kerry making chocolate pancakes for the band. This would be the first time Plumerai would be treated to Kerry’s chocolate pancakes. In a band comprised only of men, would you be treated to chocolate pancakes made by your bandmates? I don’t think so. You’d be lucky if they took a bath in your honor!

Since we’d had some time on our hands while Martin did guitar overdubs against performance #6, it was suggested that we head to the grocery store to get supplies for chocolate pancakes. Kerry, James, and I headed to the market to buy supplies. Kerry, in addition, bought some hooch. When we got home, I assembled the supplies for Kerry and I had me some wine. I consumed 3/4 of a bottle of merlot and felt perfectly fine.

Kerry started doing vocal takes against performance #6, and by 7:30pm, she’d accomplished what she’d wanted. When I listened back, I was quite enthused! I was certain we were going to get a good song out of our efforts. Lots of work would have to be done with mixing and such, but that’s always expected.

Kerry started in on the pancakes and before long I was drunken in their chocolatey goodness. While we watched (read: laughed at) “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster”, we consumed pancakes and joked around. It was great.

After dinner, I did some bass overdubs (more scratch) so that we’d have a better reference for the rough mixes. Then I had to pee.

Part V. In a Pickle

My house has 2.5 bathrooms. I use 1.5 of them. The guest bathroom is practically a shrine to the way a clean bathroom should look. I’m currently in a “super slob” phase (from 2001-2003 I was in an “order” phase, so they’d always been spotless), so all bets are off for the other two bathrooms and their level of cleanliness.

Since I’d had lots of fluids for the day, I had to pee frequently. I headed into the downstairs bathroom and was about to take care of business. On the floor in front of the toilet, there was something big. And green. And stinky.

I burst out laughing.

It was a gigantic pickle named “Big Papa”.

I left the bathroom, red-faced, continuing to laugh my ass off. Apparently, in retaliation for the abuse I’d given their bathroom, Martin and Kerry had decided to inflict the wrath of “Big Papa” in one of my bathrooms since they were unable to conjur anything similar from their own bodies.

“Lift up the lid”, said Martin.

“Umm, is that urine?”, I asked.

“No.”, said Martin.

“Is it dill?”, I asked.

“Yup”, said Martin. “Big Papa was very juicy, so we put the rest in there.”

I laughed again.

“There does seem to be a fine line between dill and dildo, doesn’t there?”, I noted.