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.