A CONVERSATION WITH LOUISE TAYLOR (continued)

PM: And so what's your signal chain--let's see, it starts with a Froggy Bottom guitar.

LT: Right.

PM: And it's picked up how?

LT: It has a Fishman Matrix.

PM: And then the preamp is what?

LT: A Rane, and a Hafler power amp.

PM: So since your setup is miked in a closet, the bleed issue is with your acoustic guitar into your vocal mic, or was the acoustic miked as well?

LT: One small acoustic mic on this particular recording session. In the past, I've had a couple mics on the guitar, and a vocal mic, and then there's a lot more bleed. It's a lot harder to get a good vocal sound, because the vocals tend to bleed into the guitar mics, and it makes the vocals sound really honky. But in this particular case, we used a Neumann U47 for the vocal.

PM: You can't fault those.

LT: No. It was a beautiful mic. And I was isolated in a room. The drums we had set up in two different spaces, two different types of drum sets--one that was real bassy in a smaller room, which included the cajon, and was more the earthy set, and then the regular drum set in the big room. If it was an electric bass track, he was out with the drummer. The acoustic bassist, Ira Coleman, who's a really good jazz player, had his own little booth. So we could all see each other, but we were separated as individuals from one another.

PM: Sonically, yeah.

LT: Yeah.

PM: And this is at a facility called The Clubhouse up in Rhinebeck, New York. [www.clubhouseinc.com]

LT: Yeah, an amazing studio. Paul Antonell had a studio of the same name in a different location, but he just built this new building, I guess about year or so ago, and it's beautiful.

PM: And it was an analog setup, right?

LT: We began with two-inch analog tape, and then dumped it into Protools. Then Ken McGloin overdubbed some electric and acoustic guitar parts.

PM: So why did it dump to Protools later? For editing and mixing reasons?

LT: Yeah. It makes that easier.

PM: Was there any cutting and pasting going on?

LT: No, not much. A little bit.

PM: So you're endorsing The Clubhouse, highly, I take it.

LT: Oh, yeah, very much so.

PM: I'm sure we'll be hearing more about Paul Antonell. A great bunch of players on this record--who is that pianist, Eugene Uman?

LT: He is a local person from my town, and he runs the Jazz Center there. I played with him on just a few occasions. After I came back from the initial tracking, I had recorded "Velvet Town" with my guitar. And I just didn't think that it really made the grade. So I went back, and I was going to record it with him on the piano and me on electric guitar. I got to the studio, and I had a guitar intonation problem. And we were there, and we had to record the song, so I just put the guitar down and sang as he played. And he did an amazing track.

PM: Absolutely monster. Yeah, that's one of my favorite cuts on the record. And it was nice to hear cellist Stephanie Winters from The Nudes appear powerfully on a few cuts. What's she up to lately?

LT: Well, she's doing a lot of work. She's working on a solo project of cello music, but not just straight cello. It's many layers of cello.

PM: Gideon Freudmann style?

LT: Yes. With remixes done by Dean Sharp.

PM: Oh, wow. That ought to be interesting.

LT: Yes. I've heard some of it and it's very interesting.

PM: I hope somebody sends us that record. I want to hear it. And a wonderful choice in Kristin DeWitt, the heavenliest of harmony singers.

LT: She blew our minds. [laughs]

PM: She has an uncanny blending ability. She can really match tones like few I've ever heard.

LT: Oh, it's unbelievable! She has a whole technique that I guess she learned from her choir director, dealing with vowel sounds, and she explained it to us briefly. But we flew her in from Texas, and we were sort of at our wit's end. Some of these notes are very--they're not true pitch, they're below pitch, and the sounds are very unusual, and I was really concerned we'd just get somebody in there who couldn't bend at all, or blend. But Annie thought of Kristin. We brought her in, and she sat down and she just sang the whole song through, and she would nail the phrasing completely. I mean, she had a tape to practice with beforehand, but it was just unbelievable. I couldn't do my own phrasing like she does. [laughs]

PM: Yeah.

LT: And then we'd just pick and choose the parts we wanted to keep, arrangement-wise. But she would just sing the whole song through, and do it in one take.  continue

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