Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

This is the long-awaited "afraid it'll sound like bragging" entry.

Some months ago I wrote a tune. I typed it in (abc) and printed it out and passed it around to the rest of The Homespun Ceilidh Band, and folks played it and seemed to think it was fun enough to play, but I didn't get a really strong vibe from them as to whether they really liked it or not.

Then car trouble and fibromyalgia flare-ups kept me away from far too many rehearsals for a while, so I was a bit out of touch -- not a good thing with recording sessions coming up, but most of the tune list for the album is stuff I still felt pretty confident on.

November rolled around, and the first recording session. Unlike our first album, which we recorded as an ensemble "live studio" recording (take after take after take), for the second one we're recording one, two, or three instruments at a time, using a digital recorder with effectively an infinite number of virtual tracks. But that first day 89% of the band (one member had a schedule conflict) got together to record "base tracks" as an ensemble, so that the first few people to record their own parts to each piece would have something much better than a "click track" in their headphones to play to. (For what it's worth -- I'm still getting used to working this way, but I think I like it. I especially like the ability to say, "I need to do that again" without making the person who just had their most perfect take of the day groan.)

We got to one of the sets that includes a tune written by one of my bandmates (part of the big plan for this album is to include several of the tunes band members have written), and I asked for the "road map" on it since I hadn't been around when the recording arrangement for it had been sorted out. That was when I found out they'd tacked my tune onto the front of that set.

I guess other folks in the band did like it.

This entry is kindasorta about that tune, but mostly it's about the experience that day, that the tune was at the center of.

Now I'd been pretty happy with this tune when I wrote it, in that it's hummable, does encourage some physical movement in the listener, and seems to capture at least some of the mood I had in mind when I composed it, but until then I'd only heard myself play it on guitar or mandolin, and the whole band run through it once reading it cold while we were waiting for a wedding reception to begin. I hadn't even known it was being considered for this album, much less had any idea how they'd arranged my tune.

I was floored. I work with some nifty, clever, talented people. I got goosebumps. Not only does my tune fit better than I'd imagined with my bandmate's tune and the third tune (a couple hundred years older) in the set, but they way they'd decided to layer the instruments in, the phrasings the fiddlers chose, and what our drummers did ... I was impressed. When I wrote it, I deliberately made it fiddle-friendly fingering-wise, but I was really hearing it on percussive -- plucked or picked -- instruments in my head. I was completely unprepared for how much the bowed strings added to the effect. Then we heard the playback on the big speakers at the end of the room, and I heard the effect when I wasn't simultaneously concentrating on playing it.

The first three times I heard it, I got tinglies up and down my spine and a curious tension in my ribs. This set, including my tune, has power. They took the mood I meant to put there, and magnified it, then added other (complementary) feelings on top. There were horses and forests in it that I hadn't known were there. Oh, the tune is still mine if you read the notes, but I can't claim all the credit for the sound. Still ... knowing that it was from something I'd written ... I was giddy. I said, probably several times too many, "I didn't realize all that was in there! I can't believe how cool this sounds!"

It wasn't until a bandmate made a (gently phrased) comment that I realized it sounded like I was bragging and started feeling self-conscious about it. The thing is, yes, I feel proud of my composition, and yes, I feel good that "my tune" is so powerful, but I didn't feel like I was "bragging" because I was going on about things that I hadn't realized I'd put there as well as what the rest of the band had added to the effect simply by a few important arrangement decisions. But once I listened to the words coming out of my mouth, I realized I was in fact saying, "Wow, the tune I wrote is SO GOOD!" Heh. *blush* Oops.

If I'd aimed for that kind of power and known I'd hit it, it would've been easier to be politely humble in recognizing what I'd done. I was taken by surprise. I was still feeling chills in my spine. I was enthusing as I would for somebody else's work (and in fact, I was doing that as well, for the already-familiar second tune in the set also came across more strongly this way than I was used to hearing it, and as much as I like how they -- we -- made my tune sound, the real power of the set is the combination of the tunes. And hers is the one that keeps getting stuck in my head).

I've had some magical feeling moments as an artist, and I've had some "sneak up on myself" moments musically (which I should write about later), and with any luck I'll get surprised again in the future. But this was one of the big ones. "That came out of me?!" This is one I'm proud of, even if I don't feel I can claim a huge portion of the credit. (Yes, I put some magic in there, but it would've stayed latent if my bandmates hadn't drawn it out again by stirring in some of their own magic.)

It'll probably be on the album (we've actually recorded more than one CD worth of material, so some sets will get saved for the next one). I can't wait to hear what listeners say about it. I just hope my writing about how it felt to be surprised by my own composition hasn't built up expectations beyond what the set can meet. But I do think some folks other than myself will feel the chills.

Have I mentioned lately how glad I am to be in this band?

Some comments related to, but not properly part of, the story:

For our first album, we stood in a big circle with a few barriers to improve sonic isolation (including a borrowed plexiglass drum shield), close-miked everyone, and recorded as an ensemble. Essentially a "live in the studio" recording. If anyone made a mistake or wasn't completely happy with a take, the whole band did it again. And again. And again. The instruments weren't as isolated as we'd hoped -- IIRC my guitar was in every mic -- which made mixdown a challenge (and punching-in to fix the occasional bad note impossible for most instruments). Even EQ-ing a single instrument was difficult when it could be done at all. I think most of us are happy with the end result (and certainly our fans seem to be!), but it did present certain challenges for the folks who mixed it, and it did require an awful lot of takes in order to get nine or ten (we had a piper on some tunes) people to make it through a set mistake-free.

This record-to-hard-disk machine is pretty cool. For the first album we put ten musicians on an eight-track recorder. This time, for each tune, we've got nine instrument mics plus a room mic (or was it a stereo pair plus a center-of-the-room mic) for the base track, which is actually a base set-of-tracks. Then for each take of each person's part, we've got more tracks for that tune. My guitar alone uses four tracks (a stereo pair near the soundhole, a neck mic, and a room mic) -- though if I'm playing at the same time as Mike and/or Jim, the room mic is shared by all the instruments in the room, of course. I think the flute gets three (head, foot, and room). I don't know how many channels each fiddle gets. But let's assume three mics per instrument, and three takes per musician (or subgroup) per set. That's about ninety virtual tracks (including the base track), which would be a damned wide piece of tape if we tried to do it analog.

(Of course, doing it on tape, one would probably use an 8-track or 16-track tape, fewer mics per instrment, and do a lot of "bouncing" -- pre-mixing of a few tracks onto one so as to free up tracks to re-use for the next instrument. The magic here isn't simply that we can so carefully capture the sound of each instrument and keep more than one take around to steal from later; it's that we can do that without bouncing. When I first heard of this technology, I thought, "Yeah, but I trust analog, and when am I ever going to need that many tracks? Heh. Right. And nobody will ever need more than 640K or RAM, either... Silly me.)