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Monday, 13 June 2005
Sweden, day 3 ::
Got to the studio a little before 11 this morning (Sun.) after having to wake Justin up to ask how to put the ancient studio Volvo into reverse (on the stick there’s a little ring to pull up). Got two more songs transferred onto Christoffer’s computer and practiced piano while waiting for tracks to bounce.
Around 1, Christoffer and Justin came in. Christoffer suggested taking another shot at the Artifacts and Fantasies piano solo, and I went into a self-doubt trip about being able to play something I liked as much the digital piano track; if we couldn’t get a good take today, could we leave the piano microphones just the way they were and try again periodically? How did Christoffer feel about possibly keeping the digital piano solo? He was reassuring and accommodating, which made me feel so much better that I sat down at the piano and played a keeper solo on the first take.
The piano tracks then complete, we decided that the logical next step was to transfer everything we’d recorded to tape yesterday ("monks”, bowed guitar, bass, organ, multiple takes of piano) from tape back into the computer in order to edit the piano tracks—there was one bad note to be fixed in the ending (by copying a measure from another take), and the separately recorded sections had to be joined together.
This opened a huge can of worms. If Logic 6.4 has a way of playing nice with multitrack tape machines via 40 tracks of digital I/O’s, neither Christoffer nor I knew what it was. There seemed to be no way around a painful long session in the Environment to get the tracks properly assigned to inputs and outputs (and if there were such a way, neither of us knew what it was).
As more and more of the day threatened to evaporate into computer work, Christoffer suggested that we export the session to Digital Performer via OMF; he can work quite quickly there. It took me maybe more 15 minutes of Environmental pain to agree that this was the best thing to do; not only would our tracks would end up in DP where Christoffer is most comfortable, but I would be relieved of most of my computer-operating duties once we were past the “final pre-production” decisions about song structures (which we can continue to do in Logic on my original files).
After the transfer, there were a couple of minor bumps as I realized that a couple more things using Logic’s softsynths and effects had to be bounced. But then Christoffer and I pretty quickly got the piano tracks edited satisfactorily. Now it seems we have a solid workflow going forward. We talked about it before breaking for dinner and agreed, it’s kind of inevitable that whenever you bring prerecorded material to a session, there’s going to be a certain amount of time spent just figuring out how best to integrate it. It’s not the kind of thing that’s easily planned, especially when we hadn’t worked together before and had no idea of how the other worked.
On the way back from dinner I noticed a Swedish flag on someone’s house and remarked to Justin, do you think that in Sweden, flying the national flag has the same jingoistic, nationalistic connotations as it does in the U.S.? He laughed because he’d been wondering the same thing on our drive to town the other day (as had I). He said, the Swedes might have as much of a nationalistic streak as we do, but it’s for different principles; great concern for the environment, social welfare, etc. I said, maybe I will plaster my car with Swedish flags.
After dinner, we continued working on Artifacts and Fantasies, generally focused on bringing the parts to life with replacement and doubling on more “organic” instruments. We added distorted Clavinet (after it became apparent that I would not be able to perform the part on electric bass), flute (Christoffer), a spooky Hammond organ sound through a guitar amp, some sampled double-bass sounds, and more singing monks. A couple of times I got a chill when listening to how much life we’d breathed into the song. And there is still a real string quartet and an oboe to be added.
With what I hope are the hardest parts of the hardest song out of the way, it seems we’re ready to move on tomorrow. One focus will be to try to get 3 or 4 songs ready for Jens to play drums and percussion on them by Thursday or Friday—there are 7 remaining for him to play on—so that when he comes out for a day, we’ll make the best use of our time.
Sometime during the day I was noodling around on the piano or Clavinet and played a lick from a Gentle Giant song I’d learned when I was 17. A few hours later Christoffer fired up his turntable and played the original of the song—he’d had it close at hand. There was one harmonic modulation where I said, “that sounds like something from (Genesis’) Wind and Wuthering”; without missing a beat he said, yes, “Eleventh Earl of Mar” (a track from that album). We’ve been a dangerous combination. Fortunately Justin has nudged us away from any more overt references to those influences.
Right before we called it a night around 2:45 am, Christoffer said he had the greatest thing for us to listen to. At first I thought it was Tibetan music, with a bunch of only marginally consonant brass instruments playing a drone. But it soon became apparent, we were hearing the theme from 2001 played by a brass ensemble in the most horribly out-of-tune, cartoonish way. I laughed so hard I fell down on the couch and cried.
The jet lag (sleepy or alert at inappropriate times) seems to be mostly gone. I just feel like I’ve gotten 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night and been drinking a lot of coffee for the last week, which is accurate.
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