Day Five at the Studio

R&R Diary

Day Five - Our last day in Studio A at Electrical Audio.  We arrived at the studio early, we rented a car instead of taking a Lyft, which meant we got to the studio in record time. We thought we'd be mixing all day, but our plan was blown to smithereens. Instead of a long day of mixing, Friday was "over-dub city." What is an overdub? Overdub - "a technique used in audio recording in which audio tracks that have been pre-recorded are then played back and monitored, while simultaneously recording new, doubled, or augmented tracks..."  What the heck were we over-dubbing? First, the last two final vocals. We completed those quickly, Carla singing with passion and love, and then we made the final selects on takes. We were so happy, vocals for all 11 songs complete & sounding great. Then we did a long series of miscellaneous overdubs on a handful of songs: crash cymbal accents, tambourine, a new acoustic guitar track replacing the original, which had an annoying pick-tapping, or was that buttons from my jean jacket hitting my acoustic guitar (might be ok for Bob Dylan, but not me), our percussionist came back to do another cajon part (we need more cajon), one of our bass players came back and recorded a new powerful and melodic bass track on one song, our guitar player came back to record an exciting new electric part on another. I also brought out my Telecaster to add a bit of texture to two songs. That Telecaster has been on every album we've ever made, I just thought it needed to find a place on the record. I played thru a 50 year old Fender amp. I played Telecaster on two tracks,  one a light & delicate finger-picking part, the other, a rocker,  which I blasted thru in one hot take. How did it sound? Agreeably grungy. Time flew by in a blur as we focused on every last detail. This was it. The clock was ticking down. We realized there would be no mixing today. A bit of a let-down, but we also realized this had been a week of fabulous energy, and if we wanted to capture a sound on the album, we had to put it down now. All the musicians played with total commitment; heart and soul. It was a fantastic week of recording. Definitely a peak experience for all of us. Mixing? That was gonna have to happen sometime in the near future. We finished up, said our goodbyes, packed up our gear, and loaded it all in the rental car. Driving home, total exhaustion rolled in like a massive black cloud. Neil Young's great collaborator and Producer, David Briggs would always tell Neil before he went in to record a song: "Be great, or be gone." Those words danced in my head above and around that black cloud. Oh, well, yes, David, we gave it our best, no doubt, damn the torpedoes!