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It was November 8th, 2008, and I was pacing back and forth in the "Arrivals" terminal at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. I could not believe that one of my all-time musical heroes, Jason Martin, was about to emerge at the top of the escalator at any moment, and that he was here for the sole purpose of making a record with me! He has been releasing albums under the name "Starflyer 59" for about 15 years, and I have almost every one of them. I admit, all of this gushing might sound a little cheesy, but I don't care. I own this website, and I can do what I want with it. :) Due to the fact that I am a recording engineer by trade, it is inevitable that a lot of this "write-up" will delve into the technical aspects of recording the album. Many of you might get bored quickly. I understand, and am OK with that. Last July, after returning home from the Parks & Rec Tour, I stumbled across a website for Jason's recording services. He has been engineering and producing for a number of years, but only at that moment did I realize that he had gone public with his freelance recording services. I sent him an email, starting with the all-too-familiar "...you probably don't remember me, but my band opened for you at The Parish back in 2006." I told him we were planning to make our 3rd album for Esotype records, and that I was running a studio where we could make the album. A few days later, I excitedly read his email saying that we might be able to make something work. We talked about starting in January of '09, but due to a scheduling conflict, things got bumped up to November of '08. I knew that I had to buckle down and work hard to finish the pre-production demos if I was to have all the songs completed in time. Since Meryll first started in 2003, I have been using the same setup to do demos. I have an Edirol UA-1000, whatever mic is close by (usually an AT3035), and a couple of programs (Fruity Loops & Tracktion). I used this setup to do the demo recordings for "You've Got Cousins," "Happened," and "Rimziate." It is quick to setup, and gets the job done. For "Rimziate," three of the songs were written in the winter of 2007 ("Cheyenne," "Danielle In Time," and "Cass, Ark"). Kyle and I worked out some of the kinks by playing them live on a tour we did in January of 2008. One of the songs was written in July of 2008 while travelling on the Parks & Rec tour ("Katillus"). The rest were written in August after booking the studio time with Jason ("Packed Sand Punk," "Rimziate," and "The Drummer Man"). "Everywhere" is an exception, as it is a Polaris cover song.
We made "Rimziate" on a 2" 24-track analog tape machine (MCI JH-16), recording at 30 inches per second. This effectively gave us about 15 minutes of recording time on a single reel of tape. I've always wanted to make a Meryll album on tape. "Happened" was mixed to 1/2" tape, but all our previous recordings had been done in Pro Tools. If you've never seen a 2" tape machine in person, it is easy to find an image on Google. That being said, the photo I have posted above is what the machine looks like whenever it breaks down. It usually involves a bad 2N3055, or...well, that is a story for another day. It really is satisfying to do an entire album on tape. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not in the anti-digital camp. I work in Pro Tools on a daily basis.) Other than the drum loops, there is essentially no "editing" on this album. Any tracks that needed fixing were simply punched in (meaning that we erased over a part until we got it right). It's nice to not have to sit at the console and spend hours sifting through take-after-take of vocals to find the parts that we felt were satisfactory.
We used 3 reels for this album, with room to spare since it's a relatively short album. The image above is a list that documents which songs were recorded on which reels, and at which point on the reel they appear. A list like this makes it easier to find each song during the sessions. For example, if we wanted to pull up "Packed Sand Punk" and add a tambourine overdub, we wouldn't need to search through all the reels blindly re-winding until we found the take. I'll never forget that the first song we started with was "Katillus." We loaded my drum loops onto the tape, did a couple things to beef them up a bit, and put down a rythym track with my nylon string guitar that I bought in Waterloo, Iowa. We doubled that with an old Gibson acoustic, and put down the bass track. The electric guitars that begin the song seemed to be jumping out of the speakers! It was a real thrill to be standing there tracking these guitar parts with Jason at the helm. I had the same level of excitement as if I were 12 years old, and enrolled in a Baseball fantasy camp playing catch with the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field. Below, I have attached a track-sheet for "Katillus." When working on tape, it is vital to keep good notes documenting which instrument is recorded on which track, since there is no computer screen to look at. Otherwise, things start getting accidentally erased very quickly! Each box usually has information about the musician, the guitar or amp, the microphone, as well as any other outboard gear in the chain including compressors and/or equalizers. It's also helpful to notate that a particular track only comes in at a certain point in the song, or that it is a double of another track.
If anyone reading this intends to make a record on analog tape, but also plans to use drum loops from a sequencing program, do yourself a favor and learn about the magic of SMPTE time-code. By "striping" the tape with time-code, one is able to sync up software such as Pro Tools with the analog tape machine. Why would you want to do this? Let's say you commit a drum loop to tape, and overdub all your guitars and vocals, only to realize that the 3rd verse would be much better if the drums went away, and instead you used a new drum loop that you came up with. If you tried to play-back your new loop, while recording on the tape machine, you would find that it would be completely hit-or-miss in terms of getting it all to sync up at just the right time. It would be a mess. SMPTE makes it possible... First, we used Pro Tools to generate SMPTE time-code and recorded it onto a dedicated track on the tape machine. Once that was done, we hooked up the output of that track into the "LTC In" of the Pro Tools hardware and "told" Pro Tools to look for incoming time-code. Essentially, Pro Tools is thinking, "OK, I am going to play-back & record at whatever speed the tape machine is running at, because I am going to keep track of how fast I see the time-code going by." On its own, the tape machine runs at a very stable 30 inches per second. But relative to a digital device which does not have actual motors and other moving parts, it tends to "drift" over a certain amount of time. The first time you play a song off the tape, it might take 2 minutes, 59 seconds, and 4 one-hundredths of a second, while if you were to play back the exact same section of tape again, it might take 2 minutes, 59 seconds, and 24 one-hundredths of a second. We took full advantage of the SMPTE on the song "The Drummer Man." On the demo version, I had recorded 2 lead synth parts with a Roland JX-3P. When I tried to re-record the synth part to tape in the studio, I was unable to get the keyboard to produce the same sound that I was so pleased with on the demo version. Fortunately, we happened to use the exact same tempo/key as the demo, so we were able to load the isolated synth parts from the demo into Pro Tools, and then transfer those tracks to the analog master tape. Everything was locked up perfectly thanks to the SMPTE time-code. Let me take a moment to talk about the DW Fearn VT-1 tube microphone preamplifier. Back in the Fall of 2002, I emailed James Paul Wisner asking him about some of the equipment that he used to record some of my favorite albums at the time (Further Seems Forever's "The Moon Is Down," and Twothirtyeight's "You Should Be Living"). In his reply, he told me that he used the Crane Song Spider, and the DW Fearn preamp, among other things. Ever since that conversation, I would go to Mercenary about once a month and just stare at hi-resolution pictures of the DW Fearn equipment. We used the same chain on on all the acoustic guitars, and vocals:
Vocals: U47 > DW Fearn VT1 > Distressor > API 550 EQ Below is a photo of me tracking acoustic guitars on "Danielle in Time." If you look closely, you can see Jason in the control room getting levels on the tape machine.
We recorded & mixed the entire record in 5 days, which is fast compared to a lot of the albums I have engineered for my clients. Going into the sessions, we had set aside plenty of time to ensure that the album would be fully tracked during the week that Jason was in Austin. I didn't want to rush myself, or rush Jason's workflow, so I figured that 5 days would be sufficient for tracking, and planned to mix at a later date. On the last day, we pulled up each song and listened back in order to decide if there were any additional overdubs needed. We usually spent about 30 minutes making adjustments to the balance, and would then look at each other and say,"Man, this is really rocking...let's print it before we do too much and something starts sounding lame." Needless to say, we ended up using almost all those mixes that we put together on the last day because we thought there was a real energy to the tracks. There was one song that I re-mixed ("Cheyenne") because there was something weird going on with the panning of the doubled vocals in the choruses. For those interested, we mixed through a 70's era Quad Eight Coronado console. Previously, this particular console was in service in Germany and Canada over the years. If you're really, and I mean really, curious you can read up about Quad Eight's history here. Most of the reverb you hear on the vocals (especially on "The Drummer Man") is a custom-built reverb chamber.
Here is a photo of Jason and I after having completed the album. On the left are the master reels, and behind us is the wall of guitar amps that we borrowed (thanks to Bill Baldwin from King Air, and Kevin McKinney).
I've got a closet-full of Meryll CD's that are piling up with each release, so with this album we've decided to release it in vinyl/mp3 format only. I could be wrong, but it seems like at this point people either love buying vinyl, or they buy a CD just to throw it onto their mp3 player. Is there anyone out there that honestly loves putting on a CD??? Maybe I sound bitter...in any case, this is what we're doing for this album. We hired Jason Ward at Chicago Mastering Service to cut the vinyl master lacquer. From there it was sent to Mastercraft for the plating, and to A&R Record Pressing in Dallas. I hope you all enjoy the record! -Andrew |
