First Draft

Smell This House

I wrote this while I was waiting for my 1/2 duplex to sell, and watching that stupid “Sell This House” show every day :

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Tanya: “Well, on this episode of Sell This House, we’re looking at Tommy’s duplex. It’s been on the market for 8 months, and there are only 12 other comparable properties on his block, so why won’t it smell…err, sell?. Let’s look at the videotape, Tommy!

Voice on videotape: “Christ! Did a cow shit in here??”

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Tanya: “Ok,-  with two big dogs and three cats in a 1,190 square foot ½ duplex, I can understand how carpet cleaning and deodorization isn’t going to make a fart in a whirlwind’s worth of difference (sorry, Tommy), so let’s turn to Roger for some ideas. Roger?”

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Roger: “Well, we can eliminate some of the pet odor by eliminating some of the pets. BJ, your Bulldog is a cute boy, but he’s gotta go. (Roger produces a large handgun and fires two shots into BJ, looks closely and then fires one more. He looks satisfied) All right! (claps hands together) now while you guys start digging a hole in the backyard, I’ll run to the supply store for some quicklime. Nothing puts off potential buyers like a charnel pit smell in the backyard. Your other dog Morrie seems to have made quick work of that bowl of antifreeze I set out, and I’ve already strangled your cats Sunny and Kingsford with the strength in my amazingly-muscled forearms! Precious Kitty might be a bit of a problem, as she seems to have disappeared after watching me dispatch Sunny and Kingsford, but moving the furniture in the spare bedroom should take care of that.

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Tanya: “See why we call him the miracle worker? You’re amazing, Roger! What a MAN!!” (starts to remove clothes)

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Roger: “Let’s DO it!”

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And then I woke up.

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Remind me not to eat spicy foods any more before going to bed.

Homemade fireworks

Every year (when I was in high school) I used to make industrial-grade crackerballs (the fireworks available back then that exploded with a pop when you threw them down on pavement) out of Potassium Perchlorate and one other ingredient.

The report was cherry-bomb sized, but not as fierce as an M80, and everyone I sold them to knew to either throw them against a wall or hit them with something like a spade. I was busily making them in study hall, wrapping the finished products in tinfoil and putting them in my satchel, when a classmate came over and said “Whatcha doing?” I told him, and he continued to stand there – said he wanted one.  I got nervous that the teacher would come over to see why he was out of his chair, hurriedly gave him one with the usual safety lecture.

During my next class I was summoned to the Principal’s office. Apparently, idiot-boy took it to his shop class, put it on an anvil, and dared idiot-boy 2 to hit it with a hammer.

They never did find the hammer head, idiot boy had a bloody nose and no other injury, and the big viewpane glass between the shop instructor’s office and the shop broke.

The Principal asked if I had any “exploding powder”, and I admitted that I did, brightly adding “How much did you want, sir?”.  He replied “All of it”.

No suspension, just sent me back to my class.Only time I ever got in trouble at school.

These days, I’d probably still be in a FBI holding cell.

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Studio notes – thick guitars

Re-listening to Boston lately, I was reminded of a trick (can’t remember who I nicked it from) to put down multiple guitar tracks without the sound (especially the high-mids) jumping out in a grating fashion.

If you record several tracks using the same guitar, the prominent parts of the guitar’s sound add up and jump out of the mix in a way that’s not at all pleasing. To get those multiple tracks to nest together rather than blare certain frequencies out is a simple trick.

31-band equalizers were (and still are) the standard for graphic EQs.

There is an individual fader for each one of these frequencies:

20Hz, 25Hz, 31.5Hz, 40Hz, 50Hz, 63Hz, 80Hz, 100Hz, 125Hz 160Hz, 200Hz, 250Hz, 315Hz, 400Hz, 500Hz, 630Hz, 800Hz, 1kHz, 1.25kHz, 1.6kHz, 2kHz, 2.5kHz, 3.15kHz, 4kHz, 5kHz, 6.3kHz, 8kHz, 10kHz, 12.5kHz, 16kHz, 20kHz.

A lot more precise than bass, midrange, treble, no?

Here’s what one looks like:

Now – if you pull down every other fader to knock little sonic holes in the guitar sound, then reverse the process for the next guitar track, BOOSTING those same tiny frequency areas, you prevent the frequency peaks from adding up and becoming annoying.

Easy peasy. Works for multitracked vocals as well.

Hear a song with creamy-sounding guitars and ethereal vocals? That’s what you’re hearing.

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And (just to show you what use I personally put this technique  to) – the choruses in “Far Away” as well as all the lead and backing vocals on the song are something I call “The Tommy Choir” – all tracks sung by me, with different EQs on each track to make it nice and creamy. Jump to 5:08 for the big chorus effect.

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Oh – the keys as well as the bass guitar are also yours truly.

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On recording demos

(in case you missed last week’s RR post)

In the mid-80s, I worked at Good Vibrations Recording Studio as intern, then engineer, and then as Manager. We were a 1” 16-track studio, originally founded by Dallas great Charlie Pride, that did almost exclusively demos and EP releases, with a few albums and commercials thrown in.

Thanks to some very good mikes and even better engineers, we managed to siphon off some work from the big 2” 24-track studios in the area, and everyone (including the first MTV Basement Tapes winners 4 Reasons Unknown) was happy when they left with their recordings.

But – they didn’t always start the sessions happy.

First-time-in-the-studio bands are a challenge in two ways. First, the ones who think they know how sessions work by reading about other people’s sessions in magazines. Those bands are a bit of a challenge, but a little gentle guidance usually gets them to cuddle up alongside reality.

Secondly, the ones who place themselves in the engineer’s hands and just go for it.

For the majority of them, it was the first time they had ever heard themselves on tape.  And therein lay the problem.  When you’re rehearsing (or singing in the shower, for that matter), you hear things very selectively.  Your brain does a neat little trick of pitch correction. You sound great.  In rehearsals, you hear mostly yourself, largely due to the fact that you’re concentrating on your own performance.

When you hear it all during playback, two things can happen :

1. You REALLY hear yourself for the first time un-selectively, and you suck.  Fortunately, this is the studio, and anything (well, almost anything) can be fixed.
2. You really hear everyone else in the band for the first time un-selectively, and one of THEM suck.  This is where it can get ugly.

I have seen more bands break up in the studio over number two than I care to remember, but of course, EVERY band has one person who’s not letter-perfect, or doesn’t have that inner metronome, or sings that one note sharp or flat. or can’t keep their guitar tuned. The rest of the band turns on them and the session can degrade into a verbal fistfight if you let it.

Don’t let it. As an engineer, your main duty (after getting them a good sound) is to be den mother, manager, producer, and counselor. Calm them down, get them away from each other’s throats, pause the session off the clock if need be, but do it.

They’ll thank you for it when they leave with their music under their arm (or in their CD case).

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OK – when I was playing in various Dallas bands, I was working a day job – since I already had a commercial drivers license from back in Waco (where I was driving a 20-ton dump truck for the City,  hauling asphalt for the Streets Department).

I was working in North Dallas hauling forklifts with a 10-wheel rollback. My boss eventually decided to get out of the hauling business and sold the truck.

Suddenly I had a lot of time on my hands, so I went over to a recording studio that I had passed numerous times as it was close to my job. The name of the place was “Good Vibrations Recording Studio”, and I found out that it had been started by Charlie Pride’s band members.

I talked to the owner and his lead engineer, and they gave me a little test.  The studio had a very nice Neumann condenser mike, and the owner said “Go out there and put a pad on that mike.”

I went out and found a foam rubber mike protector (spit guard), and put it over the Neumann. I went back and they were both laughing. What I didn’t know was that condenser mikes have a switch to limit the output, so that an amp has the same dynamics as a vocal. It’s called a “pad”.

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They took me on anyway, as an intern. I learned a lot in a short time, and after a number of months, the owner called me into his office and asked me if I wanted to be manager. I said yes (of course).

Good Vibrations was a 1″ 16-track studio (Teac/Tascam), and as such, did mostly demos for local bands who didn’t want to spend $100 / hr to record in a 2″ 24-track place. We did a fair amount of business, largely because we had outstanding microphones, which are any studio’s most important asset. One day, a local group called “4 Reasons Unknown” came in to do a demo that would shortly be the track for a music video .

The group’s manager got them a slot on a new competition on MTV (you may remember MTV from back when they were just music videos) called “The MTV Basement Tapes”.  They won the competition.  Over hundreds of bands that submitted songs. For real.

Suddenly, the phone started ringing off the hook, and we were booked 24 / 7.  Everyone wanted to record at the little place were the first MTV Basement Tapes winners recorded. I didn’t get much sleep in the months that followed.

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So – we’re at the studio daze part of my random ruminations series.  Click on the “read more” for the first installment.

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Continue reading →

Ambivalent about ambidexterity

When I was very young, the conventional wisdom (thank you so much, Dr. Spock) was to take your lefty child and turn them into a rightie, so that they would fit into a right-handed majority’s world.

This was accomplished by things like “If your baby reaches for something with their left hand, withhold it. If they reach for it with their right, let them have it”, and similar aversion training. My Mom did this with me.

Unfortunately, what this really did was to screw up my manual dexterity, and make me equally clumsy with BOTH hands.

I realized this when I took a manual dexterity test at Texas State Technical Institute which consisted of removing tiny washers from one steel rod one at a time, and transferring them to an adjacent rod. I was almost to the time limit when I looked around and saw my fellow students picking up the washers by the tens and doing the move. Too late for me to join in the cheating, I failed the test. The instructor responsible for counseling new students on their suitability for the classes/career path they wanted to take (in my case, electronics) looked at my entrance exam questions and noted that I played the bass guitar. His unspoken “NOT VERY WELL, I’D WAGER” hung in the air like miasma.

So – I’ve lived my entire life with my right-side fighting my left side for control. I shot Marksman with both hands at Allen Academy (and my “weak hand” is still almost identical to my “strong hand” in pistol target shooting), but I pick up things with my left hand, write with my right, and play bass right-handed. This has assisted me in becoming The World’s Clumsiest Person, and denied me the ability to do things I know perfectly well how to do, but would screw up through clumsiness.

Thanks, Mom.

Insufficient bone spurs

When I was in Allen Military academy, our MST (military science and technology) instructors were active-duty Army, assigned to Allen after rotating out of Vietnam. It was 1968, and things were getting a lot worse over there. The ethos of Allen Academy (one of the 10 “honor academies” in the country) was that you attended through high school levels, to two years of junior college levels, then were enlisted as a First Lieutenant. A lot of the gung-ho cadet officers bombarded the Nam vets with questions about what it was like over there.

To a man, they refused to say anything at all about it. This scared me more than any horror stories they could have told.

When I came back home to Waco, my father asked me to let him submit my name for acceptance in the Waco branch of the Naval Reserve. My dad was sort of a big wheel there (28 years active duty, and a civil service fireman at James Connally AFB in Waco), so it was a shoo-in way to escape the draft, which was crucial, as my draft eligibility began the next year.

I told him “No – it’s not right for me to hide there while all my friends were being snapped up by the draft. I’ll take my chances like everybody else.” I couldn’t tell if he was quietly approving, or thought I was an idiot.

The night of the lottery drawing, I went to Cameron Park with my friend and ex-bandmate Bobby Arnold. It was night. We took our amplifiers and instruments, and jammed some, then sat in my car and listened to the radio to hear the drawing announcements (they announced each birth date for those eligible, and called out the number that was drawn for it). The higher the number, the lower the chance of being shipped off to Nam. They drew the number for my birthday, and it was 328. They drew the number for Bobby’s and it was 3. He joined the Navy immediately thereafter.

No bone spurs for either of us.

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Company “C” (my company) :

That’s me below with the book satchel (yes, I was a book-reading nerd even then)

When I was a pre-teen / teenager, I only had one dream.

Go to Hollywood and become a cinematographer – failing that, a sound recordist. I was smart enough to know that I would need a mentor to take me on as an intern, and smart enough to know what happened to the large majority of people who ran off to Hollywood to make it big.

Did I know anyone in the  ASC?  No.  Did I think it was a good idea to hitchhike to Hollywood without much more than the clothes on my back? No.

Then I got married and had children, and that was that.

However…

I never quit looking at movies with a cinematographer’s eye, or wincing when I heard/saw a badly dubbed line of dialog. To this day, perspective, lighting and sight lines are in the front of my thoughts when watching a film.

I will say that when I heard that MGM had decided to sell all its props, scenery, wardrobe, et cetera, and bulldoze its back lot so people could build offices on it, that plunged me into a depression that lasted a week. Then a friend who owned both “American Pie” and Don McLean’s first album “Tapestry” played me a song called “Magdeline Lane”, and my heart sank again.

“MGM studios can’t make the nut
They’re auctioning Dorothy’s shoes
Gable is gone, the good witch is a slut
And I’ve got the parking-lot blues
The wizard brought benzedrine smiles
And he never let Dorothy doze
Ha- she died as she walked down the aisle
And all that remains is her clothes

Over the rainbow a Kansas tornado
Can twist up a little girl’s head
Aunt Em’s on relief and the tin man’s a thief
And even the wizard can’t wake the dead.”

 

For a look at what is gone forever, click here.

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(Pics courtesy of the “Phantom Of The Backlot” website.)

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