Anne dropped by for some session work with her (now former) band last October. Joe and I did the engineering work for the sessions. We crammed three songs into two days’ worth of tracking and Joe quickly put together some rough mixes on the third day before the band hit the road.
When Anne left the band, she had some material that had been “orphaned” — which was to say that it had been left undone. Joe and I decided to create new instrumentation and mixes for Anne’s work. Last weekend, Joe engineered some sessions where I’d tracked bass for one of Anne’s songs. This song was of the interesting variety: kind of Motown-like, which meant that you had to play a precision performance on top of a bouncy beat. While I’ve been involved with music for a pretty long time, I’ve also played lots of music where precision isn’t really the object of the performance. This meant that our sessions weren’t without peril.
While we got an early start on Saturday morning, I was just not feeling the song and kept obsessing about a perfect performance, so things weren’t going very well. After a few hours of redo’s, Joe and I decided to take a break. He had a sandwich and I had a buffet of other stuff, like wasabi peas and hummus/pita. After our break, we started to track again, and during the course of this, Joe brought up a maddening tendency in my playing; I get shy.
When I’m confident with my performance, it’s loud and even. When I hit trouble spots (tough tempo or phrasing, etc), the performance practically cowers in a corner or hides beneath a bed. Horrible. Take after take I worked on evening out my rough spots. And then I started feeling the song. Takes were getting it easier. It clicked. I wasn’t as shy. We actually got a pretty decent performance… after 8 hours.
