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After last night, I knew that I was on deck for the first thing in the morning. No pressure there. I've recorded a bit over the years, but this was my first time with Scott, so I was starting to get nervous even as I went to sleep last night.
The morning didn't start off all that well. Nick called me at 8:44, asking me if I was at the studio yet. I said that I wasn't, we had agreed upon 10am. Nick then pointed out to me the little Daylight Saving Time thing that I completely forgot about. Damn you, Ben Franklin and your 18th century agrarian reforms!!
Anyway, I threw on whatever clothes happened to be laying about, made a pretense at general hygiene, grabbed a hat and bolted out the door. By sheer force of my will (hey, that's what I'm going to credit it to), there were no police officers to witness my sublight travel from Arlington to the studio (normally about a fifty minute trip made in thirty-five or so).
Once I got there, the crew hadn't been at all lazing around. Scott had been doing further edits on Mike's drum track, so things were all set up and ready for me to go. Scott asked me to record in the control room with him. Which was not what I had expected. I had figured I would be out in the main room with my rig. Nope, I got to stand right beside him as I made each and every boo-boo. Accordingly, my level of nervousness kicked up a bit.
I think that one of the reasons why I was a little on edge about playing right beside Scott was that I have never recorded with someone at his level before. Not only is this my first time working with a new engineer/producer, but Mr. Spelbring is a pretty darn serious, big leagues kind of guy. I was feeling a lot of pressure, a good bit of which was probably self induced.
We went around the tune about three or four times, just to reacquaint myself with the song and the structure. I was feeling pretty confident about how I was going to be playing this one; just trying to get something solid and driving, a good foundation for the tune. Nothing particularly flashy, no swinging for the fences, no "see-how-good-I-am" runs (aka showing off). Simply aiming at getting a quality, driving/grooving track down.
Once we started to record, I started abandoning some of my techniques that I had been doing during rehearsal, trying to simplify my line to better serve the music. As an example, I had been doing a thumb trill at the end of the bridge. I think that it sounded pretty good, but my dynamics were too sloppy to really have it work well (particularly at the end of the run). So, I changed it to using fingerstyle instead, so I could have more control over the volume level.
Scott also had a few tweaks for me. He wanted me to double up the percussion accents in the outro, as well as playing a more straight ahead rhythm in the verses (I had been playing a pretty syncopaited rhythm to back up the guitar part) as an alternate take. But that was pretty much it, other than boo-boo catches (I whiffed a note or two during some of the transition runs) and a few more performance tips.
All in all, I played through the part about fifteen or so times. Of those tries, Scott kept about six tracks. None of the tracks were perfect, but he thought he had enough quality material from which he could ProTool a good result. My total time on the chopping block was about an hour and fifteen minutes.
I think that I could have probably done better; I know that I didn't play as many notes anywhere near as cleanly as I would have liked to, but I'm not altogether unhappy about my performance. I think it will sound pretty good when it's all said and done.
Posted by Casper at April 4, 2004 12:47 PM