Still here and still working....

Ok so I haven't updated this in about 6 months, but give me a break I'm trying to make a record here! Things are still going really good. I've been working on an album now for the better part of a year which seems strange in one way but in another way the time has flown by. I've gotten 10 years of education out of 8 months of recording. In the meantime the studio has grown in terms of gear. Josh has added all sorts of new awesome things and had a certain pride in his eye when he finally filled his rack all the way up!

We have tracking on all of the songs now. At this point we're just going through them and adding finishing touches, missing pieces, etc. After that is mixing, then onto mastering and then we'll have us an album. For little people. The songs have been fantastic. I'm still amazed we've been able to create some of the things that we have. The first song I wrote for the album which was an ode to food called "Mix it Up" we have effectively turned into a Burt Bacharach-esque magnum opus. We've got one of Jeff's songs called Doing the Math that rips itself right out of the Stax catalog. Horns, Steve Cropper guitars, B3 organ....the works. Nothing is left out on these songs which I love. Music a lot of times to me is about the detail.

I was thinking last night how long I've been wanting to create a lush, over the top, Jellyfish or Beatles style power pop record and I realized that I have. It's just that we're singing about dinosaurs and ketchup.

One of the best parts is that we've gotten help from so many people...some from in town and some from out of town. My friend Satish all the way up in NYC has provided horns on several songs, one of Jeff's friends from Auburn has laid down some AMAZING r&b vocal tracks, we've got Jeremy from Bishop Black singing, Mike Kilpatrick playing some drums and singing some rockabilly. We got Jamie from Toyshop and Tim Tucker and the Uh Huhs playing drums for us. As previously mentioned, we've got Tasha Jones singing on two songs, and most recently we've been working with our newest member Whitney who's sang lead and harmonies on several songs. She's even gigging with us. I say us, but I haven't gigged yet. I missed the first gig which was on Halloween, but I will be there for the next one which is right around the corner.

We also have one Mr. Andrew Sharp from Toyshop who will be hooking up with the Tambourine family soon and give us a sampling of his musical genius. I'm trying to type that and sound all cool like it's no big deal rather than evoke the mood of about to pee in my pants with excitement which would lean closer to the truth. I'm even getting on Amanda's nerves. When the phone rings...."if that's Andrew Sharp...you know...my keyboard player...tell him I'll call him back. Which I'll need to do. Because obviously it's band business. Since we're in a band together." I'm sure Andrew would not approve of me saying such nonsense. Particularly being called someone's keyboardist. But his playing and writing are so brilliant, it's just hard to act like a complete doofus. I bought one of Andrew's CDs back in 1993. Anyways....the point of this entire post was that I was going to post some pictures.

Josh's bass rig

















The Bassman...with the jewel light glowing fiercely. And is Jeff Sharp getting ready to audition for the Pink Spiders?





















I'm a terrible photographer but I dig on this one.


















Everyone should own a Tiny Terror. They are vicious. We have abused it on this record.




















Me, Jamie and Jeff jamming. I think of how much great music Jamie and Jeff have made together and I'm humbled. Jeff is doing a rock star pose, but it looks more like a plea for us to PLEASE TURN IT DOWN!!!



















This was a picture not only to show off the awesome Cascade Fathead microphones but also to make a point to Josh that he did not have enough headphones for us. We'd asked several times, so Jeff thought maybe he needed a visual cue. I forget what smartassness Josh pulled on us after that but it once again served to remind me not to attempt to outsmart Josh.


















Great mic. We've done lots of vocals and acoustics with it. I'm a bit baffled by the positioning of the windscreen though. That's going to be a tight fit and they will need a hand held mirror to see the lyrics.



















Couple of me and Whitney singing. Or.....Whitney singing and me being in the way


















Note the Microtech Gefell microphone. It's a great mic but I give Josh a hard time about having Nazi paraphernalia in the studio.



















DO..NOT....BOTHER THE ENGINEER!!


























Otherwise he will attack you and the ONLY thing that can withhold his might are strategically placed microphones and windscreens.


















I thought this would make a good picture but all it really does is provide the puzzling question....why are these mics set up like this?



















Engineer/bossman Josh giving what appears to be instructions to Jeff. What is this some kinda job?



















Hats and headphones.




















All for now folks. I'll update you again soon. Hopefully to tell you that we're done!! We're so close!

Onomatopoeia...I don't wanna see ya...speakin' in a foreign tongue

So......still hard at work. I realized how long we've been working on this thing recently as I saw an email from one of our first sessions yesterday. That's ok though because while I can't wait for a finished project, there's nothing better to me than working in the studio, and I couldn't have better people to work with right now. Josh is putting up a new building right by his place that will be used for studio work. I keep insisting that he has all sorts of amenities for Jeff and I. Snacks, beverages, sofas, HD television, a DVD collection with the Muppets box set included, etc. I am excited about it though and I fear my family will miss me when I move in.


The latest song we've been working on is a tune of Jeff's which I believe is called "In the Morning" but I refer to it continually as "The Onomatopoeia Song." Lots of sound effects and silliness. In working on some percussion we wanted a stomping sound and as I'm brainstorming....waiting for that stroke of genius to hit me and everyone to be impressed and reward me with Oreos and dry roasted peanuts, Josh's crazy ass is under his porch with a bunch of expensive condenser mics and Jeff is stomping on wooden boards. Those dudes are crazy. Then Jeff actually made me overdub it with drums. Me. With drums. I'm the most rhythmically challenged human being ever to pick up an instrument. So in one way it was terrifying but I think I pulled it off.


One of the songs we're working on is called "Shake it Up" and it's a rockabilly song so I've got to brush up on my Scotti Moore chops. Which are extremely difficult but I love doing, so hopefully I'll be able to come up with something.


Josh is getting really good at adapting microphones and preamps to given situations. This is obviously not something I'm good at as I own 3 mics and 1 preamp, but when you have an arsenal like Josh's, for me it would be more confusing, but he's really getting it nailed out. A lot of people tend to think only in terms of vocals and voice styles, but Josh is like "oh..ukelele....we'll need the small diaphragm condensor for that." It makes work and studio time move at a much quicker pace. Things like that I often take for granted when recording. I think that's a huge difference in recording in a professional space vs. a home studio. Someone who knows what to set up, how far out to set it up, how to patch it in, etc. I can do those things...it just takes me about a day.

Ok computer.

This week's session of recording the children's album was a bit tedious as it involved getting pretty deep into some tracks and making minor adjustments until they were sonically crammed into a box of awesome. This happens. It's part of making records. Not the most glamorous or inspiring part. Fortunately I know the least about this sort of doctoring out of me, Josh and Jeff so I can wander around and play with studio toys. An example of what I'm talking about....my breathing between phrases is a little on the gaspy side. That's not something you want on a recording. Anyone who's heard my song "High Top Girl," go pay attention to the vocal track. It's horrendous with the breathing. The phrases are so long I have to rush air in when I'm through singing. Josh showed me the technique of eliminating these sounds from a vocal track. I've yet to do it to "High Top Girl" and probably won't until I re record it properly. So you can imagine going through and finding little clicks and coughs and such nonsense through tracks isn't particularly exciting but helps out the overall sound. And you can believe that Josh will hear it. He caught some guitar fret noise the other day out of about 10 tracks playing simultaneously. Some may disagree and think these things add a human quality to the recordings, and to some extent I'd agree with you, but if you have breathing or fret noise, and you can hear what it is, it's a lot different than what usually happens which is that you just hear some buried noise that is unidentifiable and distracting a listener from the song.

It makes me think of all sorts of studio trickery that goes on. Those things are what make recording a form of wizardry. Seeing as how we're reasonable people though, let's go with "alchemy" instead. I heard Tom Petty on a documentary this weekend talking about working with my musical hero Jeff Lynne who is a very precise one track at a time fellow, and the Heartbreakers were pissed at Petty because they liked recording like a garage band. Petty said he liked making good records, but he didn't care how they were made.

I like the sound of that. I know a guy very deep into recording and he has a firm belief that all of the digital nonsense I indulge in should be considered fraud. Cutting and pasting and pitch correcting and erasing blemishes instead of retracking, etc. I find this attitude backwards and rather infuriating and for me it's always been about getting what is in your head into a tangible product. Who cares how you do it? Sometimes I need a piano on my song and I'm not the world's best piano player so I may do several takes and splice them together. I do that on any instrument. But you get this caveman mentality of "if you want to have a better piano track learn to play piano better." No. YOU go practice. I'll be making good records. What if I die tomorrow? Do you think my son would have liked the idea that he doesn't have any recorded instances of his father because I was woodshedding and "getting ready?" I have a song on this album called "My Shadow" and there's very much an African feel to it that makes it sound like it belongs on the Lion King soundtrack. I wanted African chanting done choir style. Well I don't have the money Paul Simon does to track down Ladysmith Black Mambazo and bring them in, so I did it myself. Screaming and hollering and drenching myself in reverb. And it sounds good. In fact it sounds really good. I was a bit nervous about it at first but Josh and Jeff liked it and so far everyone has liked it and I've heard no indications by anyone that it sounds like me doing it.

But it's more than that, and I never realized it until Josh pointed it out to me in a conversation one night. There is nothing that you can do, or that we do on a regular basis in Pro Tools. Splicing, cutting, pasting, pitch correction, etc. that they haven't been doing from the beginning....they used to record slow and speed tapes up to make singers voices sound higher. The famous solo from Skunk Baxter on Steely Dan's "Kid Charlemagne" was pieced together from a million takes. As was the solo from "Comfortably Numb." And I hate to disappoint all of the guitar dweebs out there, but Jimi Hendrix's guitar didn't actually play backwards. It was a studio trick. One that couldn't be recreated live. Elvis's echoed voice on the old Sun records... The sound that MADE him Elvis and defined Sun studios....was done through trickery. In fact it's called "tape echo." You can't do it on your own. It's simulating an echo which is non existent in nature. The studio is my favorite place to be. And it's because of this trickery, alchemy, magic, or "fraud" if you will that makes it so exciting for me.

Lastly I will say that human discretion is what makes all of the difference. And what a great example when Josh was mixing down some Brian Wilson style vocals all three of us had tracked over a song called "Swing Swang Swung" that Tasha Jones had done the lead vocals on. He cleaned up all of our harmonies with some slight pitch correction here and there. Then he went to do the same to hers. Because her pitch was not perfect, as most people's aren't. But he realized it wound up sounding worse when he did it. On pitch or not, the girl's voice is really beautiful and pitch deviations do not take away from the performance at all and in some ways enhance it. I was really proud of Josh as a producer and engineer for him to say "we'll leave well enough alone" rather than "everything needs to be perfectly on pitch" which is something I think a lot of people may have done. It just reaffirms to me that people using computers to make music is not the same as computers making music. To me it's every bit as organic as sitting around a campfire beating on rocks with sticks, blowing into harmonicas and singing folk songs.

Tangerine Tamborine

So I'm pretty deep into this project to just start blogging of it now, but it's been a great expereince and I wanted in one way or another to document. So, I'm working on a children's album. The brainchild of the musical genius of Jeff Sharp (Whitey Herzogs, Tim Tucker and the Uh-Huhs, Girlfriend Voice). Most of you who have known me a while will know my long time music playing partner Josh Lovvourn whose name I've never spelled correctly. He has a nice studio setup and had been playing with Jeff a while when they started working on this project and asked me to be involved. I've always liked working with Josh and have always wanted to work with Jeff so it was a pretty great opportunity for me.

So far we have a lot of songs...some finished, some almost finished, some not even close. But we've been pulling in people from all over to come out and help us out. We've had guys in playing trombone, drums, percussion, etc. We had Tasha Jones (Tim Tucker & The Uh-Huhs, The Tasha Jones Band, Ben Trussell) come in the other day and put some vocals on a couple of songs. They turned out really great. She is an amazing singer and really fun and relaxing to be around.

The education I'm getting from just recording with these guys and learning their knowledge sets, from Josh's ability to place a microphone, to Jeff's ability to hit an instantly recognizable but still original melody every time he picks up an instrument is inspiring to be around. I get nervous and fumble around when I have to play or sing in the studio. Things I can just throw out with ease under normal circumstances, and a little less ease on stage, I just wilt when it's time to record it. 4 simple notes, and I sound like that rock monster from "Never Ending Story" trying to play piano.

Josh is truly an engineer. He moves around this stuff like he was made for it. Jeff Sharp is truly a producer. He'll do the most bizarre shit I've ever seen. He'll make Josh record something completely stupid that he knows we're not going to keep. And when you see him do it you realize the brilliance behind doing it. You're doing "something." And those things inspire other things. You brainstorm. A bad idea is no reason not to go forth with it until you have a good one. Good lessons for me to learn in the studio and as a writer as well.

I'm so excited about all of these songs. We still have a good ways to go, and I'll continue to update this blog about it.

Superdave and Jeff Sharp rehearsing a part:

















Josh and Jeff not working:

So...I guess I'll continue this blog

Instead of making a new one. That seems so wasteful. My album in a month album is complete. I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not to re-record lots of these pieces through some proper gear and with people more knowledgeable than myself and release it as its own record as well as re-recording some old songs of mine in order to have an "EP" of sorts or whether or not I'll just make one album of blended material. If I did that it would be a long ass record. But a track listing that would look something like this:

1. Whisper Room
2. Dimly
3. Out of Sunshine
4. Out of Sunshine pt. II
5. Jerry
6. High Top Girl
7. She Sure Was Strange
8. Umberella
9. Play My Guitar
10. Said it Yesterday
11. What makes the world go 'round
12. Shell

See? It needs some paring down I think. Either way I'm going to get to recording them before too long. But in the meantime I'll be working on another record, which is what I decided to open this blog back up about. ::See next post::

Pencils down please.

I stayed up....very late. I made a mad dash to the post office after getting enough sleep to function. So the CD is off. I will post it tomorrow right here if you'd like to listen but I burned a CD and listened to it and some of the stuff got truncated. So I'll make a couple of adjustments to make sure the songs are on there in full. That was my fault.

I'm kinda glad it's over and kinda sad. One thing I realized I can do is work and make music and write words and music that I can be proud of. What I realize I'm not very good at is mixing, and EQing and other such technical things I need to work on. I'm also not good at doing every single thing in the world myself. I would love to hear this record one day with real musicans playing on it. I had my friend J come over the other evening and lay down some piano on top of mine for the song "Dimly" as well as adding some mega ELO string sections on it. It was nice just being able to get that. My friend Ian had been providing bass for me and his recording rig broke in the last week so I had to play some of the bass myself. Also not conducive for good music. And all of the flat and sour notes throughout the process? As I listened I was going to go back and repair them but I got a MASSIVE cold this week! I could barely talk much less sing.

Don't get me wrong I'm not whining or making excuses for my music, I'm quite pleased with what I've accomplished, even if it brings out (as you can tell from past posts) some neurosis in me. I'm just thinking I'd like to hear some of these songs...hell all of them, executed in a manner that's more fitting than the constraints of time and ability. But I did it. I was supposed to have 35 minutes. I stretched to have 31, but I have 11 original songs, and the rule was 35 minutes or 10 songs.

Some songs are 5 and 6 minutes. Some are 1 and 2 minutes. I decided to quit letting things hang me up on what is and what isn't a song. If I have a verse and a chorus of a song and that's all the lyrics I need to say what I'm saying then why not just move on and call it a song?

I have some powerpop, southern rock, metal, some trip hop, country, jazz, yacht rock, pop,....not because I'm trying to be eclectic. Because those things are all at least a small part of what I am. Nothing was overly contrived in terms of the styles of the music, in fact quite the opposite, as I get frustrated by not knowing who I am or what it is I do musically.

So my track listing....as I started the project off with the ambition of 5 songs...some are there some aren't. But there's a lot more.

1. Calling Blue
2. Dimly
3. Dorian Grace
4. I feel Much Better
5. Out of Sunshine
6. Shell
7. While You Stare
8. Out of Sunshine part II
9. Whisper Room
10. Evil in June
11. What Makes The World Go 'Round

I will post a mediafire link for everyone tonight or in the morning.

It occurs to me that I make pretty music.

And often hate myself because of it. Half of the time I spend trying to make music is to come up with something pretty. The other half is spent despising the prettiness of it. Sometimes to the point of trying to make it ugly. I make fun of ugly music a lot. Because I can't really make it I suppose. The Ramones, The Velvet Underground, AC/DC, Nirvana, their music wasn't pretty right? On the other hand Brian Wilson's, Paul McCartney's, The Davies Bros.....their music is. I'm not sure where I fit in there. I guess all in all, all music has all shades. I mean let's face it is there anything more beautiful than "Candy Says?" And Wilson can descend into unlistenable chaos at time. But I always feel like I'm straddling that line. Does it even matter? I don't know but it's something I obsess over to the point of it being unhealthy. Who has it perfect? Who balances all of it...making music that's sometimes so beautiful it's transcendent and sometimes so ugly it's uncomfortable to listen to but at the exact same time? David Bowie for me is the first to come to mind. So am I feeling like a failure and wanting to jump off of bridges because my music isn't as awesome as David Bowie's? WTF?

Speaking of awesome music, my friend Sean has finished his RPM record. It's better than anything I've ever done and in my opinion quite brilliant.
here's his blog
http://leatherbackbulletin.blogspot.com/

and here's a mediafire for anyone interested in listening
http://www.mediafire.com/?dm3gvt2zw4n

So another problem that has me severely down...I think one of the Jagger/Richards team said once about how music is an organic experience. I make these records. I make them myself. And in some weird way I get absolutely nothing out of them. Even when I get fantastic musicians I admire to play on them it's usually all but done and I'm like "here, here's how it goes." There's no interaction with other humans. While I'd like to say it doesn't have an effect on the music...and maybe it doesn't, but I think it does, and more importantly it has an extremely profound effect on the attitude I take towards making music. I think we probably need people to share it with. But maybe it's just me. And maybe after a little sharing I'd get pissy and take my ball and go home anyways.

I'm sick. I'm going to bed. I'm going to try to post a song tomorrow called "Me and the Devil" Yes, obviously lift from Robert Johnson and I'm sure I'll change it. Geez.