Geek Out!!!

As I’ve mentioned a few times here, I’ve been going through the process of recording a CD lately with my band, Morning Glory. Since it now seems like there is a chance that we might actually finish it some day, I thought that I would write a little about how it’s been done. It might be a little nerdy, but some people might enjoy it, and, at least to me, the whole process is super-interesting! So feel free to skip it, but it you’re interested, here you go.

First of all, the recording process has taken a loooooong time! Since we’re recording all original music, I guess that you could say that it started when we wrote these songs. But the actual recording began last Thanksgiving!! We had already recorded some songs the previous year in order to get into festivals, but we had some new songs and felt like it would be nice to have a CD that represented us a little more currently. Of course, by the time we finish (knock on wood), it won’t even really be that current any more! But what can you do?

The first decision was a big one: we wanted to make sure that this was a really good recording, so we went into a studio called Uncle to do the initial recording. Essentially, we did the same thing that many professional bands would do, which is to record all of the instruments separately in a studio where we could play together pretty loud. Each instrument had its own microphone, but they were all separated as much as possible by foam walls mostly, although my amp was actually in a separate room. We really agonized about how to do this!!

There is another popular way to record, which is to have each person do their own part at different times, completely separately. The big advantage of this way is that each instrument sounds totally clean, and can be manipulated (made louder or softer, given some echo, etc.) very easily because they were all recorded like separate songs. This is how most music is recorded these days and is a very wise way to make a CD.

However, we did not do this. We decided to record all together instead, with everyone playing at the same time like a live show. Unfortunately, this makes it much harder to “fix” each instrument later, since it’s possible to hear the other instruments in the mix at least a little. So if you make a mistake, you either let it go (and squint every time you hear it), or make everyone else stop and start the whole song over again.

So why do this? Well, for one thing, recording this way is faster – you can record a lot of songs in one day, like we did, but you’ve go to make sure everyone is ready to play all of the way through, or else you start to think of ways to hurt each other. But the big reason to do this is because of the type of music we do. We are a “jam” band as they say, which describes many odious musical abominations, but does in fact illustrate the fact that much of what we do is to play off of each other in a kind of improvisational way.

What we’re always trying to achieve is a “live” kind of sound with the most energy and musical interplay that we can possibly get. Unfortunately, that leaves plenty of room for mistakes, rough spots, and self-indulgence (as opposed to the desirable self-expression – many people can’t tell the difference). There’s really no perfect way to do it, which is exactly the same problem that the Grateful Dead always had; one way is cleaner and more precise but lacks heart, and the other way is messy, and can actually result in completely useless recordings. The Dead tried everything!! But this the way that they ended up doing their most successful studio albums, and it seemed to make sense for us. Luckily, IMHO we have a great band!! We also had a good recording engineer named Scott to help us out with this.

I won’t go into too much detail here, but the outcome of one very intense day of recording was, fortunately, some very usable “tracks” – which are the recordings of each instrument (including each individual drum!) – that could be manipulated separately without too much extra noise. We were really lucky that they came out good, because another downside of recording this way is that it’s pretty expensive! In some ways, getting through that first day was the most important part of the process since everything else is built off of it, but it was also the fastest part. That was one day; everything else has taken 7 months!!!

Actually, it’s not like we’ve been working every day on the recording since November. There have been many other hurdles to overcome since that first recording day, including losing our other guitar player (he’s fortunately not on the initial recordings) and organizing all of this music – which is now a jumble of very confusingly labeled computer files. Thank God that our drummer Joel dealt with this crazy process!!

Poor Dan alone in his space.

The other thing that needed to be taken care of as well was to get the equipment that I needed to finish the recording at home. Joel has most of this stuff already, but there were some really crucial reasons to get my own. First of all, Joel & I do both live in Los Angeles, but if you know this city, you know that this is meaningless and it could take me literally thousands of hours to drive back and forth to his house as much as I would need to. Second, to do all of the necessary guitar stuff takes a ridiculous amount of playing the same things over and over, and I really didn’t want to drive Joel and Dorota insane.

Finally, I looooove having all of this cool stuff which lets me get all of this music down forever!!! I’m not really a techie gadget guy, but putting this home-recording system together was really exciting!! I had tons of help from a lot of people (especially Joel), and I think that it came out really good. The technology today is so unbelievable that it puts even the major recording studios of past years to shame. Of course, just because you can record like the Beatles doesn’t mean it’s going to come out like Sgt. Pepper’s!! but it’s such a great challenge and an adventure!!

Anyway here’s my home setup:

As you can see, it’s not that extensive, which is really important in a small place where it can’t stay set up all of the time, so each piece is very important. The heart of the whole thing is Em’s little Mac, which has an incredible program called Cubase LE. The Mac comes with a similar recording program called Garage Band, but Cubase is much more sophisticated and powerful. Here’s what it looks like on the screen (there are actually many screens, but this is the most common one):

This program tries to visually and functionally mimic the mixing board of a real studio (like this):

The track of each instrument is shown separately and can be manipulated in thousands of ways, with the volume being the most important. The program has digital “faders” like on a mixer that can be programmed to go up & down as the song plays to bring instruments in and out of the “mix”, or the whole song. It’s very cool to see them all moving on their own!!

All of the music tracks go into this program, and are then converted into digital files, like mp3’s. You can then manipulate these in many, many ways, and finally burn it all onto a CD and hope that it all worked out. Sometimes I think how amazing it is to consider the amount of work and technological wizardry that goes into creating some really bad music!!

Although the computer is the heart of the operation, there are some other pieces of equipment that are vital as well. While a Mac has a built in microphone, it is unfortunately not possible to get a good recording using this tiny thing – believe me, I’ve tried!! What is needed is an interface from the music to the computer. That’s the small box to the left of the Mac. It’s called a Firebox by a company named PreSonus (there are other kinds as well, but this one is very good). It has some other functions that I haven’t really tried out yet, but its main job is to be the pre-amp between a microphone and the computer. In other words, it takes the musical signal from a microphone and converts it into something that the computer can hear and understand. You can make recordings without this kind of device, but they’re not going to sound very good.

The microphone is pretty self-explanatory, but I got a good one at a great price from a company called GLS that make really good mics for not too much $$. Mine is the ES-57 and you can order them here:

http://www.speakerrepair.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Store_Code=genem&Category_Code=microphones

By the way, for vocals, the better mic would be the ES-58.

Finally, since I’m mainly recording guitars, here’s a quick word about that. I’m using my Fender Strat through a Fender Twin Reverb amp. The only kind of quirky thing here is that since I’m recording in a small apartment, I can’t really turn the Twin up to the full 100 watts where it sounds the best. In fact, if I turned the volume above 2 or so, we’d probably get thrown out! Since the amp doesn’t really sound its best at this volume, there are two ways to get around this. The first is to run a cord directly from the back of the amp into the Firebox, without having the speakers on at all. It’s easy to do this, and you can get a pretty good sound without hearing the amp at all. The Firebox has functions to make an instrument sound pretty good.

However, it still doesn’t sound that good to me. I really like hearing the real sound (hearing the air move as they say) of the guitar through the amp, so I had to work around this a little. This is mostly done with my effects pedals. Here’s my pedal board (sorry it's sideways - had a problem with this one for some reason - but the top is on the right):

Most of these aren’t even being used for the recording, but two of them are really important. The first is the little yellow box on the bottom. It’s called an AC Booster by a company called Xotic Effects. Basically what it does is to boost the amp signal a little bit without affecting the volume, so the amp sounds more like it’s turned up without blowing down the walls. It’s a great little box and I use it live a lot too. The older I get, the less I like that loud loud rock!!

The other important box is one I just got. It’s called a Holy Grail, and is just a reverb pedal, but it really helps since the amp reverb also doesn’t sound as good at low volume. It’s also about the warmest sounding reverb that I’ve heard and I can’t believe that I went so long without it!! Oh yeah, I almost forgot one last pedal. The white one on top is a digital guitar tuner. It’s not exactly crucial, but it sure makes life a lot easier when you’re constantly playing – it’s another one I wish I would have bought twenty years ago!!

So (if anyone is still reading), that’s about it for the recording studio. Of course there are about a millions other things that I wish I had, and that would make the whole process easier/better/much more expensive. But this set-up seems to be doing the job so far though. I’ll let you know when I’m done!!