Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Where music is concerned am a sensualist. I want to put my hands right on the music, wrestle with it with my whole body, seriously invade the music's personal space. The piano is too prim for my muse; she expects a level of physical intimacy far beyond sitting on a bench holding hands. She's really a more of a stick-her-tongue-down-your-throat-and-rub-up-against-you sort of muse; she expects to be seduced, not courted. The harp, man, the harp curves into your embrace, leans against you, sings into your collarbone, and thrills to your touch. Clearly, this is the beginnings of a beautiful relationship." -- siderea, 2003-10-26

Earlier, I left the house in a hurry, not having had time to post something I'd wanted to post, so I punched in my entry on my cell phone at red lights. It was too long to fit in a single SMS message, so I split it into two entries. Unfortunately only the first message seems to have actually gotten posted. Whoops.

So what should have appeared at 13:15 today was: "Re-hurt arm loading car, hope Ultram is enough. Happy birthday to merde, whom I miss."

Well it's three hours earlier on her coast, so maybe it won't seem quite so late in the day for me to get around to saying it... And I was so proud of myself for getting the LJ-HTML tag in there at the next-to-last traffic light before the recording studio.

(Ultram was indeed enough to make me comfortable enough to play, but wow, it's worn off now. Ouch.)

Today's recording session went reasonably well, I think. It looks like "Argh, it feels like we should've gotten much more done! Wait, how much did we get done? Hey, that's a reasonable amount. But it feels like it should have been more!" is getting to be a pattern for me. I guess I'm just impatient.

Getting there late wasn't a big deal, because Jim was still putting down tracks for tunes that Mike and I had already recorded our parts for, so I wasn't actually needed for the first forty minutes I was there. Jim and I did some tunes together, and there was at least one that Mike, Jim, and I were all playing on together. I think Mike said that after today, the strummies are almost caught up to the fiddles in terms of how many tunes our parts are done on.

One of the things I have to get used to about the Honda is the small-looking and funny-shaped trunk. The first time I looked at it, I feared that I wouldn't be able to fit as many instruments into it as I was used to. Well, it is true that I'm not going to be able to carry as much equipment in the trunk (and I'm pretty good at real-world three-dimensional Tetris), but I can get four guitars in there plus my music bag and my binder of sheet music if I'm careful and one of the instruments is a solid-body electric. (We didn't wind up recording any bass tracks, but I had brought my bass just in case. I did use my twelve-string and six-string folk guitars and my classical guitar.) There was an amusing moment when I started opening guitar cases and looked around for stands and didn't see enough guitar stands. I only saw one empty stand. Emory said, "We can't possibly be out of guitar stands in this room. We've got lots of stands." Well, yeah, but also lots of guitars. I was all set to go fetch the folding stands out of the car, but he found another stand hiding behind a keyboard, he freed up another stand by putting the Baby Taylor in its case, and I remembered that I had a tiny folding stand ("Pocket Titan", IIRC ... which really sounds like something other than a guitar stand to my ears, but oh well) in the bass guitar's case.

Listening to Jim through headphones, I noticed how amazingly cool his cittern sounds amplified. I thought there was some reverb or chorus on it, but I was told that the signal was completely dry. Apparently what I was hearing was the result of mixing the direct signal from the pickup attached to the instrument with the sound from a mic on a stand in front of it. Very rich, not at all tinny, while still retaining that distinctive crunch and jangle that makes the cittern stand out from the guitar and bouzouki. I just wish it were a bit easier to hear when we're unamplified.

On the one hand, I want the recording part of this project to be finished already so I can hear what all this work sounds like mixed down, and so that we can start putting copies into the hands of our fans. On the other hand, there's still so much I want to add, so much I want to get exactly right, so many nifty ideas, that I wish we could afford more studio time. On the gripping hand, Mike pointed out that by the time we finish all the tracks we'd planned to record, then cut the list down to what'll fit on a CD, we'll have enough left over to be a good head start on our third album.

Recording in ones and twos and threes feels like less pressure than trying to play a perfect whole-band-at-once take, especially as I get more accustomed to playing along to other instruments in my headphones instead of right there in the room with me. It certainly provides a much cleaner set of tracks for the engineer to work with at mixdown time.

On the set of tunes I used the classical for, I had originally planned to play folk guitar. But trying for a particular feel, it dawned on me that the classical guitar sitting next to me might better suited what I was trying to do. So I asked the others whether they thought it made sense to try again using the classical instead. And it worked. I knew it would sound cool on the second tune, which has a slow but insistent feel; I wasn't sure how it would sound when I went to my usual vigorous right hand reel attack on the third tune. As we hit the transition into the third tune, I thought, "Well, Flamenco players make it sound right..." then noticed a measure later that I was moving my right hand and arm differently than I had five minutes earlier on the steel strings. My body knew what to do. Listening to playback afterwards, it all worked, but there was a surprise waiting. Emory threw the previous take into the headphone mix, so we were hearing nylon strings in one ear and steel strings in the other -- I'd thought about possibly layering the two sounds -- and it turned out I'd put accents in different places in the two takes in one section so that one guitar answered the other, completely unintentionally. Bonus! I don't know whether we're going to use both together in the final mix, but it's being considered.

I sometimes wonder how much of a rut I let myself get into with some of these tunes, and whether I'm at the right balance point between everyone in the band knowing what to expect from each other and "keeping it fresh" (especially making the second and third repetition of a tune in a set not sound like a cut-and-paste of the first). I'm still not sure how I'm doing on that scrore in general, but at least I know that particular set is still fresh.

Like I said, it felt like we didn't do enough, but looking back at what we did, it was more than it felt like.

Dammit! Before I left the house this afternoon I made sure there was a long enough tape in the VCR and the VCR was turned off so that it would record the shows I'd programmed it to. Trusting the machine, I let myself get caught up in LJ and email instead of stopping in the middle just to go watch television (besides, it only takes three fourths as long to watch a show on tape). Just now I passed by that room and noticed it wasn't recording. I have no idea why not. I turned it on and back off again, and it started recording (The Practice), but this means that everything else I wanted to catch today got missed. The interesting-sounding movie this afternoon isn't a biggie, but if anyone local to me (Baltimore) happened to record Star Trek: Enterprise, Charmed, or Alias tonight, and would be willing to lend me the tape, I'd appreciate it. Especially Trek and Alias, which have multi-episode plots. And most especially Alias, which I really want to see in order if possible.

I hate it when my technology lets me down. It makes me feel so ... betrayed.