Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Okay, I'm home from the recording session and have made a couple of phone calls, checked my email, and teased the cat with a laser pointer. I'm tired. Yeah, this is another of those "so much I have to do, but my body is done for the day" evenings. My mother called to say that the painters will be showing up a 09:00 tomorrow morning to do the floors upstairs ... which is on the one hand a positive thing because I'd been told they couldn't be here tomorrow two weeks ago and suddenly we can get stuff done now after all; and on the other hand an annoying thing because I thought I had another week to sort out getting help moving enough stuff around in some other room to be able to put the dresser from upstairs somewhere on the second floor, and more importantly, help moving the dresser itself. Moving it to the center of a room and throwing a dropcloth over it while they worked on the ceilings and walls was okay, but I don't think I have the apropriate technology for doing the equivalent while they work on the floors. Whoops. Well, too tired to try to figure it out tonight. This has been a long and tiring day. I'm exhausted and my arms hurt. And I think something is shouting my name from inside my refrigerator ... I can't tell from here whether it's stout, porter, or a Scotch ale, so I'll have to open the fridge and find out which one is calling me. It sounds like it might be the Skull Splitter (Scotch ale). I may or may not stay awake long enough to get caught up on LiveJournal tonight.

Recording is tiring in that way where you don't realize how tiring it is until you stop and suddenly discover you're exhausted. Like skiing. Well I did get a clue when I noticed what kinds of mistakes I was starting to make. Then again, I didn't realize how hard I was working on a single take of a single track until I noticed how hard I was breathing at the end of it. So I guess it's not just the jumping around on stage that makes me so tired when we perform. Scottish rhythm guitar is an athletic endeavor, especially on the reels. Irish too, for that matter (especially on the jigs). But the exhaustion of a long recording session is more than that of course, 'cause the mental aspects can get rather intense. Focusing on getting the timing exactly right to match what's playing in the headphones, sweating each tiny mistake, having to be so much more precise technique-wise ... (On stage: "Okay, that Bm chord was a little weak because my left hand was tired, but it only lasted a quarter of a second and didn't wreck the performance. On the whole, that set rocked." Recording: "That Bm was a little weak, and I'm going to hear it over and over and over again for the rest of my life, and any fan who buys the CD will eventually notice it too, if they play it enough times. Gotta do this again, and pay careful attention to my left hand this time, while hoping I don't screw something else up because I'm preoccupied with getting the Bm right.") Maintaining that focus is tiring in and of itself.

But we got a lot done. Bouzouki and guitar parts for most of the sets I play six-string on, cittern parts for a few sets (Jim had to leave after lunch), and most of Mike's flute parts I think. A couple of those might wind up needing to be re-done after we listen to them with non-tired ears, but I think we've got useable tracks for most of that. We didn't get to any of my twelve-string work yet (though Jim did lay down one twelve-string track). I'm off tomorrow (otherwise the painters couldn't come); I think tomorrow starts with Jim and then the fiddles. The next time I go in, I'll probably knock out most of my twelve-string parts and the one or two sets I want to play my classical guitar on.

Last weekend we laid down "base tracks" of each set, with the whole band playing together (well almost; one person was unavailable), to use instead of a click track to listen to when individuals and small subgroups go in to lay down their real parts. It's not actually a single ensemble track -- each instrument got its own channel and track, so the "base track" for a set is really a set of eight or more tracks. I think this plan is mostly working, but it does take a little getting used to, for folks who aren't already accustomed to playing along to a recording in headphones, which most of us aren't -- Spinning Reels was recorded with all of us in the same room playing together, not overdubbed one or two people at a time. (It's something I need to get used to anyhow, since I would like to find studio work in the future.) The two "gotchas" I noticed are that sometimes the base mix needs tweaking so I can hear the melody instruments clearly over the sound of my own instrument in the room, and that playing along to myself -- laying down a real take of a tune where I have melody while listening to the recording of myself a week ago to keep the timing accurate -- is disconcertingly difficult when I can't hear the two versions sufficiently distinct from each other. At one point I had the engineer do severe EQ to the base track so that it wouldn't sound like the exact same instrument I was playing (which, of course, is exactly what it was -- the same instrument).

"Make the playback of the base track all midrange. Make it sound like it's being played through a telephone."

[pause] "Are you sure that's what you want?"

"Yes, let's try that."

[sounding unconvinced] "Uh, okay then."

Well y'know what? It worked. Sounded pretty wonky, but that didn't affect my ability to play along to it, and I could hear which was me playing live and which was me a week ago, and thus solved the problem I was having with confusing audio feedback of what I was playing. Gotta remember that trick.

But the other problem I'm having is, as noted in the very short entry I mailed from my phone, the difference between "perfectionism" and "attention to detail". This has to be good. It's going to be good. And for it to be good, we have to care about the mistakes, we have to have the patience to keep trying until we play it right and get a good track. But there's a line in there somewhere, and on the far side of that line are the thing that never gets finished because the artist can't leave it alone, and the thing that goes way over budget from trying to eke out that magical take that's a hair's-breadth better than the one four hundred and thirty eight takes ago. I've got no idea how easy or hard this is for my bandmates, but I know I'm hearing the siren song of the "just a little bit better" take that I know I could eventually play given enough chances. And that I have to figure out where the balance is; when to ask for one more because I can do it better, and when to say, "That was not only mistake-free, it was good, and it was good enough, so let it stand." Because, dammit, I want my parts to sound on the recording the way they do in my head; I want to sound like twice the guitarist I am, and make people gasp at the beauty of my tone and subtle nuances of my phrasing; but this is not a huge-budget project, and studio time is not unlimited.

Perhaps it will help to remind myself that this band is greater than the sum of its parts. I'm not sure any of us is as good as the band is. My parts don't have to encompass all of the magic of the band in a single instrument.

But a shorter answer might be, "Glenn, you've overthinking this."