1. The surdo. Ed talks about having an ideal stable of guitars that fill a precise musico-spiritual spectrum of tone and touch. Some of it's about the sound and some is the thingness of it. The ideal Ed stable includes a Strat. A dreadnought acoustic. An electric 12 string. An electric sitar. Certain indispensable amps. Stuff I can't talk about here. This list is sacred, hermetic and evolving, a hovering monad impinging on Ed's consciousness in a persistent manner that would be oppressive if he didn't continually refine the stable with acquisitions, deletions or tweaks. Each modification to the collection is accompanied by a deep, thorough audit and overhaul of the remotest edges of his soul.
My own stable is an overlooked ensemble of instruments, to be played by a to-be-discovered band of players who will one day accidentally wander into my apartment and be so taken with my brilliant and subtle collection of musical artifacts that they will commit themselves on the very spot to playing my songs, on these collected instruments, for my hardcore fans, forever. They include at the moment: baritone uke, acoustic guitar (steel), acoustic guitar (nylon), guitarron, banjo uke, congas, bongos, bass drum, selected cymbals and a gong, diatonic accordion, melodeon, marimba, harmonica, and let's not forget voice.
So, the surdo. I've got a great old bass drum that I bought at the San Francisco dump in 1983 for $2.00 with house paint applied to the heads to warm up the tone, but the stable has been crying for something authentically Latin. Once in Buenos Aires I saw a guy play a bomba, which is a big wood shell drum with goat skin head. I've been looking for the right one of those for years with no luck, but then I saw a surdo on craigslist for a good price. This is the Brazilian marching bass drum with a steel body and a goatskin head on the top. It's loud, very loud, and fun to beat upon. I got this instrument thinking it would be the ideal fit into the Latin world arrangements I've been digging on lately.I marched it home and started recording, but rather than greasing the path to glory, it's tone once recorded is an enigma. I'm trying changes in arrangement, micing and eq to get it to work and I'm still searching. I feel pressure to finish the CD but this thing is bugging me, maybe I have to rethink the whole project. The problem is I can't yet hear how it fits into the mix. Is it like a kick drum? Is it a distinct voice in an arrangement or a certain something down there that gives it some warmth or power, or is it just adding a bunch of low-end muck? I can't tell if it's that scenario where I have to trust my ears and go back to the $2 drum or if I should be growing some new connections in my tormented brain to hear it properly. As a complicating factor, my downstairs neighbor totally blew his cork while I was trying to get just this one last take down. I never heard him pounding on the door because I was wearing headphones and I will not reprint the note he shoved under my door, but it was unkind. Through the acoustic barrier of my floor and his ceiling he could apparently not appreciate the wisdom of my replacing the original classic Brazilian bass drum beat (bahBOOM, bahBOOM) with a nice sold thwack on the 2 and the 4. And then the altered pulse with the hotter dynamics in the middle section. I'm really sorry man, but I did get the take. Hopefully it will drop into the mix ok.
2. The last song. It's so easy to write the first song. It is nothing, I write songs like this all the time without even thinking. Why not make a whole CD of them? The second song had been sitting there patiently for years, waiting for this moment. I simply plucked it from it's place and laid it neatly in an attractive spot on the disc. The third song was going to be used in a movie, but the young director foolishly chose to use a MIDI instrumental from his girlfriend's brother's website instead, I had merely to make a lyrical adjustment to the chorus for inclusion in my most newest and most amazing collection of songs to date. The fourth and the fifth songs were written on consecutive days on the subway; one traveling uptown and the other down. Their
respective feels tastefully imply the orientation of the transit. How well I remember the sixth song! I was atop a breezy hill on some other coast and it came to me in a rush of pleasant insight. Thankfully I had my portable recorder handy to bag the moment for later use. The seventh is always a bit tricky, much like the weariest inning of a baseball game. I tricked the seventh song into existence by pretending to make a grocery list and casually scrawling a few significant phrases in the margins. I then "lost" the list only to "discover" it some weeks later in the inner pocket of last season's jacket. The eighth and ninth songs are inferior throwaways that I've buried in the middle of the CD in the hope that the listener will sort of zone out but not become annoyed and hit the skip button. At the tenth, the home stretch, I felt some apprehension, and acknowledged this emotion by recording it three times at different tempi and choosing the one in the middle. But now I'm at the last song, and as has been the case in the past, it is making trouble.Though it will easily be the finest song on the album, it is behaving in a very coy manner. I thought the first impulsive take would set me up, and Bill says it's a great recording, but the singing is monstrously out of tune and the vocal abandon that seemed intuitive on the night of recording has by now revealed itself to be merely careless. Then I tried takes with Alison singing along to keep me company, but we sounded too fooken Irish. Fifteen or so takes in a fierce frame of mind, twenty more gentle, then sad, then puckish. Still no take. Takes in the morning, then try late at night. Sober, drunk, before the nap, after the nap, all no dice.
Keep on rolling my friend, keep on rolling. Either I will get it or it will get me.
2 comments:
Which song are we talking about here, the one that took 20 takes and will be the best song? Is it OK to ask, or is this partly about the mystery?
It's always ok to ask! When I blogged this, the song was the last one to go, and I finally nailed a take that I could stand behind. I was finished, done, it was a wrap. Then I took it to master and found that a whole other number I thought was in the bag needed 14 more mixes. I shit you not.
The lure of perfection drives me to pursue a ritual of just-about-doneness. Being a responsible citizen and delivering the thing when you say you're gonna get it done is not always the responsible thing to do. The sensation of finally arriving at the horizon motivates. The end of the rainbow. Is. Here.
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