Wilco and other commercial failures. . .

So I was hanging out with Peja the other night, cooking dinner, or doing the dishes (or, more likely, checking my Email), and I had tunes on the radio, and this lyric, that I always liked, just struck me right between the ol' eyes and maybe it was the 3 tablespoons of raw sugar I had just eaten, but I thought, "man, that's a great fucking lyric". It's from a Wilco record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and the lyric is --

All my lies are always wishes
I know I would die if I could come back new

The record is featured in a documentary called I am trying to break your heart, and it shows the band recording an amazing record, and then getting kicked off their record label for it.

What is it about records that get people kicked off labels? Sloan's Twice Removed, Thrush Hermit's Sweet Homewrecker (the band's gone, but check out Joel Plaskett), and that Wilco record. 3 of my favorite records, all got people out of record contracts.

Just goes to show.

Huh?

Pianoforte!

There's a 100 year old piano sitting in my dining room. It's missing some hammers. It's beautiful. I've been searching classified ads for years looking for a good deal on a suffering piano, and just when I stopped looking, one was offered to me. Thanks to the Rice family (John, Janie, Milan, Mason) for trusting us to give it a good home -- and for delivering it! I'm 7 keys above middle c in tuning it -- poor Peja has been very tolerant of the same bad notes over and over and over.

The Dream. . .

Do you have one of these?

Somewhere in the back of my aged mind, I still believe that with the right circumstances, I could end up in the NBA.

(These circumstances now include a plague on everyone over 6', everyone with jets, and everyone with what the kids now call "ups" - formerly "hops", "springs", and "air".)

This music thing is really just my back-up dream.

The basketball dream makes it seem almost possible.

Mixing

I was sitting at the mixing board today, going over some of the tunes we've been working on. Right now I'm using a Tascam 2488 24-track (that's the 24 in 2488, I guess) hard-disc recorder (uh, what's the 88 about?). So, you make a sound (drums, voice, whatever), and then a microphone picks it up, converts it into electrical energy, that moves down the wire into the mic pre-amp on the back of the 2488, where it's amplified, and the amplified signal is converted to digital information by an analog/digital converter. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I want to talk about is mixing. Because the more I record, the less I want to dick around with frequencies and levels. I used to crave perfect control, 4 band parametric eq's, the ability to pinpoint each sounds essentialities and cut down on the noise. And with digital, you can really do whatever you want. Once the information is digital, there isn't the problem of having the greatest mixing board, because eq becomes a simple math problem, and the 2488 is pretty much a math machine. And I've used the eq to fit 10 guitars into stereo sound, to squeeze a voice between them, but I'm just not fantastically interested in doing that this time around. I'm getting the feeling that an honest record should have so little eq, that the arrangement of instruments should have no extra noise to filter out, that it should just sound like it would if you were in the room when we recorded it. It's not like in person someone would say, "you know, the high end snare sound is really getting in the way of the vocals".

I started making multi-track recordings on a karaoke machine -- it had a double cassette deck, so you could record yourself singing over your karaoke tapes, I guess. But, I could record a guitar track, and then switch the tapes and record a voice over that, and then switch the tapes again and add drums. Voila! Multi-track recording. But I couldn't mix, of course, I couldn't eq or adjust levels. That's actually how John Lennon recorded Revolution 9, one of the most hated songs in popular music history -- using simple tape over-dubs.

What the hell is this post about?

I don't know.

It's late.

I'm trying to keep up writing.

I'm using a minimalist mixing approach.

Would that my blogging be the same.

Anyway, I'm not begrudging my newly found ability to manipulate and mesh sounds -- the 2488 has really helped me out. I'm just finding that with this record, I'd almost rather record on a karaoke machine -- remove the temptation.

Jay.

P.S. The above 2488 was yet another final piece in the studio puzzle.

When is enough enough?

Every conversation I have with Sienna about music gear has the same moment -- she looks at me with her eyebrows raised, and I know she's thinking "how much is this going to cost us?" Not that she isn't amazingly supportive, even encouraging as far as buying gear goes, but sometimes I get the feeling that she's starting to suspect that the great gear acquisition has no finish line. Which, of course, is the truth. Now, I mean, a lot of the time I'll be talking about gear that I just think is cool, like a $2200 Custom Telecastor, which I would never buy. . . Probably never. . . I mean, unless I got a deal or something. . . Which is the story behind the $300 ride cymbal upstairs right now, which, once again, completes my studio.