Recording diary, day thirteen: How the Cards May Fall.
Continuing my efforts to balance really packed days -- like day twelve of recording, where I hauled half the world into the studio for a tea party -- with really low-key days, day thirteen was plotted to initially include only myself and Alisa Garcia, and then, when Alisa had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, to include only me. It's been a while since I've had a solo session, so I was game for it.
It was also sort of nice to have this be a solo session, because, well, this was it for me at Flowinglass. There's going to be at least one more San Leandro session, when I bring Alisa in to record the flute line for 'In This Sea' and Saber in to do the backing vocals for 'Downhome Aphrodite', but barring vocal patches on existing tracks, I'm done. Lucky session number thirteen was my last full vocal track to be recorded at Flowinglass.
There are still tracks to be recorded in Washington and the UK, but my main recording house is done with me. It's bittersweet and strange to realize that after everything...
We're really almost there.
The participants:
* Me (for the last time in San Leandro) on lead vocals and discussions of the album as a whole.
* Kristoph Klover on recording and mixing and matching yet to come.
Also participating, if more tangentially:
* Chris Mangum, on pick-up after the fact.
* Margaret Davis, on pick-up before the fact.
* Isis and Nefertiti, on being too darn cute for words.
The itinerary for the day:
* Record the vocal line for 'Downhome Aphrodite'.
Just one goal, in contrast to our previous session's thirteen, and more, one relatively sweet, mellow goal; 'Downhome Aphrodite' is a sweet, mellow song, written for a good friend of mine while walking up and down 2nd Street in San Francisco. It's full of Greek mythology and torchy longing, and it makes me happy. Moreover, since Mich Sampson got her hands on it, it's somehow turned into a Tori Amos song, which is...too awesome for words.
(Seriously. I asked Mich, 'think you can do a piano track for this?', and what she came back with sounds like something off of 'Little Earthquakes' or 'Boys For Pele'. It is...truly astonishing. It rocks, it rolls, it aches, it cries, it's darn near enough to break your heart into little pieces. You want to know why I'm honoured by the people I have helping me with this album? This is why. This, and a dozen other contributions just like it. I have been privilaged beyond words by the people I get to work with on this project. Privilaged beyond words.)
Since this was a workday session, I arranged to have Margaret pick me up from the San Leandro BART station and drive me back to the studio; Chris, who works closer to San Leandro than San Francisco, agreed to pick me up after we were done. Thanks to the trains actually running on time (for once), I got there early, and killed a cheerful fifteen minutes babbling at Shawn, aka, 'that guy who talks X-Men with me' before Margaret arrived, at which point I hung up and spent the ten minutes of the drive cheerfully babbling at her, instead (although not about the X-Men). We arrived at the studio to find Kristoph already enthroned in the booth, ready and raring to go. Life is good.
(Kristoph had actually been working on the guitar part for 'In This Sea', which is going to be heartbreaking and wonderful, and which will give a very solid foundation for the flute part to rest on top of, thus creating a whole that is substantially more than the sum of the parts it's made of. Sniff. My sorrowful little sea chanty is all grown up...)
Kristoph and I performed the normal dance of greeting and 'what are we working on today'-ness; I confirmed that all we were doing was 'Downhome Aphrodite', and that we'd be bringing Saber and Alisa in later, and we set out to set up.
The microphone was already set up for vocal recording: good. It was set up for someone approximately seven feet tall: not so good. I pointed out that perhaps this was not going to work for me. Kristoph agreed, and much fussing and adjustment followed before Kristoph retreated to the recording booth to start setting levels...which was when we discovered that the headphones I was wearing didn't have any output through the left ear. Ugh. Much fussing and swapping back-and-forth of headsets followed, until he was on the broken ones, and I was on the ones that actually worked. A winner is me!
At approximately ten past five, we started our first take. This lasted right up until the last verse, when my timing went slightly insane, and we were forced to step back and patch. Pah. Still, it was a good start, and we did two more takes in much the same way, running end to end on the song.
Then Kristoph had one of those strokes of genius that make him such a wonderful recording engineer, and suggested that we do a take with me standing closer to the microphone. As in, 'my nose kept bopping the pop screen when I leaned forward' levels of 'closer to the microphone'. Being an obliging vocalist, I did as I was asked. That meant pitching my voice softer, of course, since I didn't want to blow the microphone's levels, and singing more intimately, and...
...oh, wow. It really is a Tori Amos song.
Delivering the song in this strange new way transformed it utterly, elevating it to entirely new levels. We did three takes in the close-up, but it was pretty clear that the takes we'd done at my original distance from the microphone were just so much ephemera now: this was the real deal, and what he'll be working with as he puts together the scratch for Saber. And it was...amazing. Really, truly amazing. Hearing something I've written make the jump from 'just a little song' to 'genuine music' is...there aren't words for how it feels. This whole project has been worth it, just for that.
Since we were done recording, I retreated to the recording booth to discuss the album's timeline, mixing, mixing costs, and where to go from here. He said he had some suggestions for places where the various tracks could use filling in -- a bass line here, a drum fill there -- and is going to send me his notes for discussion. (Let's be serious, here: if I have the money, I'll almost certainly okay everything he suggests, because he hasn't steered me wrong yet. His grasp of what the songs can be, versus what they currently are, is breathtaking.) We both talked about how happy we are with the recording to date, and what the mixing cycle should look like. And then?
Then we went into the house, where we talked about the news and I played with the cats, Margaret tolerantly fussing with Christmas presents and calligraphy in the background, until Chris came to carry me away. It was a very small ending to my active participation in the recording side of things; while I still have pieces to record, none of them will be with Kristoph, and while I have a lot of choices to make about mixing, balancing and instrumentation, that's administration, not performance. Somehow, while I wasn't looking, this album took some very long steps towards being done.
When I began this recording cycle, at the end of January, it felt like we would never get this far. Now, with only three songs left to record, and all of them in the hands of engineers I have to travel to reach, it feels like it's all ending far too fast. I'm excited, elated, and scared, and it's too late to turn back now.
It's going to be an album.
We're almost there.
It was also sort of nice to have this be a solo session, because, well, this was it for me at Flowinglass. There's going to be at least one more San Leandro session, when I bring Alisa in to record the flute line for 'In This Sea' and Saber in to do the backing vocals for 'Downhome Aphrodite', but barring vocal patches on existing tracks, I'm done. Lucky session number thirteen was my last full vocal track to be recorded at Flowinglass.
There are still tracks to be recorded in Washington and the UK, but my main recording house is done with me. It's bittersweet and strange to realize that after everything...
We're really almost there.
The participants:
* Me (for the last time in San Leandro) on lead vocals and discussions of the album as a whole.
* Kristoph Klover on recording and mixing and matching yet to come.
Also participating, if more tangentially:
* Chris Mangum, on pick-up after the fact.
* Margaret Davis, on pick-up before the fact.
* Isis and Nefertiti, on being too darn cute for words.
The itinerary for the day:
* Record the vocal line for 'Downhome Aphrodite'.
Just one goal, in contrast to our previous session's thirteen, and more, one relatively sweet, mellow goal; 'Downhome Aphrodite' is a sweet, mellow song, written for a good friend of mine while walking up and down 2nd Street in San Francisco. It's full of Greek mythology and torchy longing, and it makes me happy. Moreover, since Mich Sampson got her hands on it, it's somehow turned into a Tori Amos song, which is...too awesome for words.
(Seriously. I asked Mich, 'think you can do a piano track for this?', and what she came back with sounds like something off of 'Little Earthquakes' or 'Boys For Pele'. It is...truly astonishing. It rocks, it rolls, it aches, it cries, it's darn near enough to break your heart into little pieces. You want to know why I'm honoured by the people I have helping me with this album? This is why. This, and a dozen other contributions just like it. I have been privilaged beyond words by the people I get to work with on this project. Privilaged beyond words.)
Since this was a workday session, I arranged to have Margaret pick me up from the San Leandro BART station and drive me back to the studio; Chris, who works closer to San Leandro than San Francisco, agreed to pick me up after we were done. Thanks to the trains actually running on time (for once), I got there early, and killed a cheerful fifteen minutes babbling at Shawn, aka, 'that guy who talks X-Men with me' before Margaret arrived, at which point I hung up and spent the ten minutes of the drive cheerfully babbling at her, instead (although not about the X-Men). We arrived at the studio to find Kristoph already enthroned in the booth, ready and raring to go. Life is good.
(Kristoph had actually been working on the guitar part for 'In This Sea', which is going to be heartbreaking and wonderful, and which will give a very solid foundation for the flute part to rest on top of, thus creating a whole that is substantially more than the sum of the parts it's made of. Sniff. My sorrowful little sea chanty is all grown up...)
Kristoph and I performed the normal dance of greeting and 'what are we working on today'-ness; I confirmed that all we were doing was 'Downhome Aphrodite', and that we'd be bringing Saber and Alisa in later, and we set out to set up.
The microphone was already set up for vocal recording: good. It was set up for someone approximately seven feet tall: not so good. I pointed out that perhaps this was not going to work for me. Kristoph agreed, and much fussing and adjustment followed before Kristoph retreated to the recording booth to start setting levels...which was when we discovered that the headphones I was wearing didn't have any output through the left ear. Ugh. Much fussing and swapping back-and-forth of headsets followed, until he was on the broken ones, and I was on the ones that actually worked. A winner is me!
At approximately ten past five, we started our first take. This lasted right up until the last verse, when my timing went slightly insane, and we were forced to step back and patch. Pah. Still, it was a good start, and we did two more takes in much the same way, running end to end on the song.
Then Kristoph had one of those strokes of genius that make him such a wonderful recording engineer, and suggested that we do a take with me standing closer to the microphone. As in, 'my nose kept bopping the pop screen when I leaned forward' levels of 'closer to the microphone'. Being an obliging vocalist, I did as I was asked. That meant pitching my voice softer, of course, since I didn't want to blow the microphone's levels, and singing more intimately, and...
...oh, wow. It really is a Tori Amos song.
Delivering the song in this strange new way transformed it utterly, elevating it to entirely new levels. We did three takes in the close-up, but it was pretty clear that the takes we'd done at my original distance from the microphone were just so much ephemera now: this was the real deal, and what he'll be working with as he puts together the scratch for Saber. And it was...amazing. Really, truly amazing. Hearing something I've written make the jump from 'just a little song' to 'genuine music' is...there aren't words for how it feels. This whole project has been worth it, just for that.
Since we were done recording, I retreated to the recording booth to discuss the album's timeline, mixing, mixing costs, and where to go from here. He said he had some suggestions for places where the various tracks could use filling in -- a bass line here, a drum fill there -- and is going to send me his notes for discussion. (Let's be serious, here: if I have the money, I'll almost certainly okay everything he suggests, because he hasn't steered me wrong yet. His grasp of what the songs can be, versus what they currently are, is breathtaking.) We both talked about how happy we are with the recording to date, and what the mixing cycle should look like. And then?
Then we went into the house, where we talked about the news and I played with the cats, Margaret tolerantly fussing with Christmas presents and calligraphy in the background, until Chris came to carry me away. It was a very small ending to my active participation in the recording side of things; while I still have pieces to record, none of them will be with Kristoph, and while I have a lot of choices to make about mixing, balancing and instrumentation, that's administration, not performance. Somehow, while I wasn't looking, this album took some very long steps towards being done.
When I began this recording cycle, at the end of January, it felt like we would never get this far. Now, with only three songs left to record, and all of them in the hands of engineers I have to travel to reach, it feels like it's all ending far too fast. I'm excited, elated, and scared, and it's too late to turn back now.
It's going to be an album.
We're almost there.