I’ve been planning and planning to record my new solo album for seemingly the last 7 years. I’ve written tons of songs and laid down demos and even released a few of them as singles with videos and everything but, and this is a big but, I haven’t recorded anything that I was certain was for a new album. I have basically been in a sort of creative limbo.
A few weeks back I thought of a way to finally get the ball rolling. I went through a bunch of old voice memos, iPad demos, recording sessions, and assorted odds and ends from the last few years and found out that I had dozens of potential tracks for an album if I could just get myself to knuckle down and do the work. Today I finally started doing the work by tracking the basic tracks for the first song I’ve chosen to work on. I’ve decided on the sound and artistic direction for the album and given myself a few parameters for recording it that ought to make it an interesting challenge.
Basically, I’ve decided to do something I haven’t done since the 1990’s and track the album on tape. I will bring the tracks into the computer for mixing and mastering, but I’m doing the actual recording on a 4-track reel-to-reel deck so the album will be what is known as ADD (Analog recording, Digital mixing, Digital mastering). Why bother with that? I suppose it’s because arbitrary constraints can make the recording process more interesting and I’m hopeful that the resulting album will have a more cohesive sound if all the instruments are recorded on the same reel-to-reel tape system. I could use a tape emulation plugin or something but that would violate one of the other constraints I’ve decided on: no digital effects trickery. I won’t be comping or looping or faking anything, no recording to a grid, I’m just going to play the instruments and sing and if I screw up I will stop and rewind and do the take again until I get it right, just like in the pre-digital days. Any guitar or vocal effects I want will be part of the original takes, no post-processing plugins.
It has been a very long time since I recorded this way. It’s extremely primitive, but that’s the idea. I want the record to represent actual performances as they occurred at a specific point in time. I don’t want to be second-guessing and tweaking and doubting myself or leaving room to defer decisions about tones or sounds until some future point. Do the thing, record the thing, move on, that’s the plan. If there are imperfections, so be it, but the result will be real and it will be physically printed on tape.
Indecision can be one of the enemies of creativity. Creativity involves inspiration and planning and disciplined execution and it can, of course, involve meticulous editing and revision and alteration to get things exactly perfect, but when recording as a solo artist (as opposed to with a band) it can be fairly easy to wind up with a sterile sounding result because every track is recorded in isolation. You don’t have the live dynamics happening between yourself and another person that brings humanity into the process. Removing some of the crutches that you lean on to get a “polished” result is a possible way to bring back a little of the natural feeling to the recordings. I know that the albums I did in the old days on 4-track cassette were harder to make because of the inherent limitations of the technology and they sounded less refined but more alive.
I’m a much better musician now than I was 25 years ago and I know a lot more about recording. I also have much higher fidelity equipment so I don’t anticipate this sounding like those old 4-track records, but neither will it sound quite like the pure digital stuff I’ve been tracking since the early aughts. If I get a result that is coherent and warm and makes the record I hear in my head, the extra work will be worth it.
I expect that tomorrow I will be completing the tracking for the first song and planning the next session. I think I can finish tracking the record in a couple of weeks once I get going since all the songs are already written.
Today I worked on a new recording of my song “Ostrich” which I released as a video single a few years back. I laid down vocals, guitars, and bass. Drums, piano, and one more guitar part will happen tomorrow. My plan is to keep each song to no more than eight total tracks and a “Let It Be… Naked” level of production complexity so I won’t be going crazy with lots of over-dubs. The session today took about three hours. Up next will likely be “Brenda Loves James”, “Flying Through the Frames”, “Mostly Water”, “Never Replace You”, “Monkey Mind”, “Basement Heroes”, “What A Day”, “Because”, “Complicated Animals”, “The Wolf Is At The Door” or any one of a few more that I have written down on a list but can’t recall off the top of my head. Like I said, I have a pretty big backlog of songs. The album will wind up weighing in at a dozen songs minimum, probably fourteen if all goes according to plan. Just because I have a list doesn’t mean I won’t change it up a bit.
I think this is gonna be a good one. I am feeling the mojo. 🙂
