A CONVERSATION WITH THE SHERPAS (continued)
TPR: Cutting and pasting.
PM: Ahh.
TPR: And everything, really. Once you get to the Protools, you say, "Why did I ever do that? Why did I ever use the Roland system?"
PM: When I heard that Buddy Miller, Mr. Retro, was a Protools guy, it gave me pause. He was or is one of their beta testers.
ML: Buddy Miller, who's playing $50 guitars he bought in a pawnshop.
TPR: Man, you've got to go Protools. Once you get used to undo, you're never going back. I did a demo session the other day on ADATs, and it just dawned on me--I tried to do a part, and I got it wrong, and I told the engineer, "Oh, just undo it."
ML: And the engineer says, "I don't have that button." [laughs]
TPR: Even that alone, man, is worth Protools. Undo is worth Protools.
PM: Now, is the Protools undo different than the Roland undo?
TPR: Similar, but you have a lot more options with Protools than you do with Roland.
TK: You've got virtual tracks for every track, so you got twenty-four tracks.
TPR: You can do that with Roland, too, but it's a lot easier with Protools. I cut my teeth on the Roland 1680, so I know all about it. But Protools are so much more intuitive and so much easier.
ML: It was great with Cliff, too, because Cliff had just gotten this, but he really impressed me with how quickly he worked it. And he kept things really moving, because we had a pretty limited time frame.
TPR: You'll see if you just sit in with Cliff Goldmacher for a day and watch what he does, learn his key strokes and have him set up your Protools rig when you get it or something.
TK:
He's doing a home studio consulting thing.
[cliff@goldmacher.net]
PM: He is?
TK: Yeah, he'd even come to your house and help you design the studio. We got a guy now who's building me a studio office at home. He's starting in a couple weeks. I'm taking everything that's in that room out, and he's going to build an L-shaped desk down one side of the room. I'm going to hang all my guitars in one corner, keyboard mounted on the wall, the whole nine yards.
PM: That's exciting, yeah.
TK: It's affordable, too.
TPR: Tell you what, man, I watched Cliff for a week when we were doing basic tracks. And then he set up my computer, and I was good to go in half a day, as far as learning. "Oh, I remember Cliff doing that" kind of thing, it was easy.
PM: Okay. Before I get in too deep, I think I want to get out of the Roland thing, because it just doesn't feel quite right.
TK: Plus you can see what's going on with Protools.
TPR: It's on the screen. You can cut and paste. If something's just a little bit off, you can just squeeze it over.
TK: Oh, yeah.
PM: I need to see what's going on. And I hate that little screen, hurts my eyes.
TPR: So do I.
PM: Okay, well thanks for all the tech talk. I like that stuff. And it kind of brings the recording process to life in a whole different way than talking about the songs as compositions and such. But allow me to change the subject. So, Mickey Grimm got to play some drums.
TPR: Right.
PM: You used him on about half the songs?
ML: More like two-thirds, yeah.
PM: And some of it just stayed loops, right?
TPR: Yeah, a couple of the songs stayed loops. On some of them we brought the loops back in, like along with the drums a little bit. You would think maybe that just wouldn't work, but--
TK: We took the drums out of "Yes," and went back and got the loop, and said "Man, this is way cool." But then we brought the drums back in again on the second verse. It gives you somewhere to go. It gave us lot more options when we were doing the mix.
TPR: I like how you did that, man.
PM: Okay, so that everybody understands, and so that I do, too, when we say "loops," is that a drum track that you composed on a machine, or something that you imported from somewhere, or...?
TPR: Well, loops are generally something that you import. And usually when people talk about loops, they are prerecorded loops that you would buy. We used this program called Reason that already had a bunch of loops in it. And what we would do is, we'd take their loops, we would resample them at the tempo that we wanted, maybe take out a beat here, take out a beat there, and that kind of thing. And that's basically where we got just about all of our drum loops. And some of the loops were so good that all we did was use the original loops. Like on "See Myself in You," we used the loop.
ML: And on "One Heart."
TPR: That loop on "One Heart" was just awesome.
PM: Didn't need any changing, not even the tempo, just--
TPR: In Reason you can resample the loop at a different tempo, make them whatever tempo you want.
PM: So what did Marinelli do? The great George Marinelli got called in to play some guitar.
ML: He played guitar on every song, basically, in one day.
PM: Damn!
TPR: When we got almost done, we felt like there were some parts missing.
TK: There was a little groove missing here and there. I mean, we could have gone with it, and it would have been very good.
ML: Well, also, there was not the opportunity, unfortunately, for us to spend more time, for me to come to Nashville, or for Tom PR to be in Nashville, to put more guitar stuff down. And we all felt comfortable with George. I had worked with George a long time ago.
TK: We wanted to have the album for Folk Alliance. I mean, Michael and Tom are both great guitar players, but I've worked with George a lot, and I felt it would be neat to have him. We'd wanted to do everything ourselves except for the drums. But George is so tasty, and he's such a song guy.
PM: He never does anything wrong.
TK: So we felt, well, this would add a cool flavor to it, and it would put the icing on the cake. Then we could mix.
PM: How much did he play on each song? Did he play surprisingly little and just put in the right thing here and there?
ML: It varied. On some songs he played straight through and on some songs he had two parts or maybe three. There's one tune, "System," where we don't even bring him in until the outro. He laid stuff down, but we ended up using a trumpet for a solo instead.
PM: What guitars was Marinelli using? Is he playing a Tele the whole time?
TK: He played a Tele some, and he played a Gretsch, not a Country Gentlemen, but a semi-hollow body.
PM: 6120 or something like that.
ML: Yeah, yeah. continue
