Catching a wave of creativity, I booked studio time last week at Chimpanzee with the intention of recording the basic tracks of a spanking new song. My hope was to get the acoustic guitar and vocals down before telling K about it and to surprise him with a quality recording that he could enhance with percussion.
This plan of secrecy fell apart. First, in attaching the demo MP3 to an e-mail on the day before I was to record, I mistakenly sent it not to the studio hand, YY, but to our former bass player... of all people. It was only hours later, well into Tuesday night, that I noticed the error and sent the file in the right direction. The next morning, while walking toward the studio accompanied by Janey, a Chinese exchange student at our school who had come along to see what a recording studio is like, I proposed we stop first at a convenience store within view of the studio. We still had 20 minutes to blow. As we set our stuff down behind a parking block, I heard my name called out and, looking up, saw K sitting in his car about 10 feet from me. There were no other cars in the lot. It's a sparsely peopled area. The studio is in the middle of a giant rice field surrounded by mountains. OK, so many places in Japan can be described that way; but this is truly an out-of-the-way location. It took me well over an hour to get there by bike the one time I hazarded a trip on two wheels. K had made a lunch stop at the convenience store on his way between point A and point B and it was a shocking coincidence that he was parked near the studio as we approached it. K travels the length and breadth of the prefecture regularly for purposes of customer relations.
This plan of secrecy fell apart. First, in attaching the demo MP3 to an e-mail on the day before I was to record, I mistakenly sent it not to the studio hand, YY, but to our former bass player... of all people. It was only hours later, well into Tuesday night, that I noticed the error and sent the file in the right direction. The next morning, while walking toward the studio accompanied by Janey, a Chinese exchange student at our school who had come along to see what a recording studio is like, I proposed we stop first at a convenience store within view of the studio. We still had 20 minutes to blow. As we set our stuff down behind a parking block, I heard my name called out and, looking up, saw K sitting in his car about 10 feet from me. There were no other cars in the lot. It's a sparsely peopled area. The studio is in the middle of a giant rice field surrounded by mountains. OK, so many places in Japan can be described that way; but this is truly an out-of-the-way location. It took me well over an hour to get there by bike the one time I hazarded a trip on two wheels. K had made a lunch stop at the convenience store on his way between point A and point B and it was a shocking coincidence that he was parked near the studio as we approached it. K travels the length and breadth of the prefecture regularly for purposes of customer relations.
So much for the idea of recording in secret, since the gods of fate seemed opposed to it, but something worse wrecked the intended surprise: the three-hour session went horribly.
After I put a first, imperfect guitar performance down, YY said that I needed to play with the click track. Well, I never play with click tracks and don't like having to think about them. Furthermore, there is so much rhythmic variation in the song I was performing that no 4/4 click track was going to keep me on pace even if I played along with it exactly. YY assumed that if I just overrode the click track for a few measures here and there, it would eventually fall back into place. Alas, the world of music does not all revolve around 4/4 time. After he acknowledged the incompatibility, what ensued was a good hour and forty-five minutes of his trying to edit my performance by shifting sounds around like some kind of chemist in a lab. He wanted to create a click track out of my guitar sounds that would reflect the 3/4 measure here, 5/4 measure there, or string of triplets that occurs three separate times in the song. The problem with this plan is that YY did not understand the rhythm he was trying to match it up to. Another 30 or so minutes melted away as he backed away from his computer screen and tried with pencil and paper to analyze the three poly-rhythmic sections. This led nowhere. After a long stretch of waiting in the hallway, strumming my guitar while Janey sat studying a textbook, I interrupted YY's analytic session, saying there were only 20 or so minutes left before we had to leave since Janey had a part-time to get to. Upon this, YY showed a stroke of boldness or, rather, desperation. He asked me to perform the song, playing and singing at the same time, just as I had done at home. I did this passably, but with not as much success as in my kitchen. Then, in the final minutes, all that was left to do was to record the pianica part. YY then burned a CD of this hastened recording while finishing up some kind of commercial project he had started for another customer the day before. I trashed the CD after reaching home without once listening to it. It was a useless token for the time and money handed over like some kind of charity offer to Chimpanzee.
That whole endeavor, three hours in the studio, cost me the equivalent of 135 US dollars. Unless its purpose was to convince me that using this studio is a giant waste of time and resources, it seems that I was ripped off. However, I am now convinced.
The problem here is the entire approach to music. You come into the studio as a living, breathing musician with dreams in your hands and lungs and you need to warm up and get yourself going and feel inspired and what do you run into? A nice guy who works like an intimidated, myopic technician. He asks you for a single performance, anything approximating your song idea will do. Then he obsesses over the "piano roll view" editing screen on Pro Tools. Not a thought is giving to nurturing or challenging the performer to improve. Very little time is even reserved for performing. In three hours, I must have played for no more than 8 or 10 minutes, and most of that was in the vain dash for the finish line as time expired. The rest of the "session" was consumed by YY's noodling around with software. Apparently, the purpose was to perfect my first take, or to create a rhythmic template out of it, so that I could listen to it while playing a second time, but why not just ask me to replay it? Why not listen to the whole song and think about its intention and how best to capture that intention rather than just focusing on the click track?
This is the same YY who advised me earlier in the year to purchase 750-dollar software that was incompatible with the Pro Tools he knows I use. Another punch in the wallet. YY is a very nice guy, but he has to be one of the most expensive acquaintances a person can have. Give me four girlfriends over this guy, a wife and three kids, and call me better off by comparison.
Since that miserable experience at Chimpanzee, I rediscovered my damn-it-all attitude and have produced a far better demo at home than I did the first time or than the hastened studio product that YY used to appease me. K and I may have to return to the studio if we are going to record a full drum set, but I would rather stay away from that place and dig my own creative holes if that's what it comes to.
The thing is, the software can be an impedance when you feel inspired and just want to get your ideas down before they disappear. So, while continuing to learn Pro Tools, to capture song ideas, I still turn to GarageBand, which is bundled with any Mac.
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