Drums and Bass

We finished tracking, and are a good ways into mixing things.

I woke up to some of Tim Luntzel's playing almost every day without realizing it for the longest time. He played on a lot of Bright Eye's I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and I like to wake up to First Day of My Life.

I'm really particular about bass playing. I used to be a bass player, I'm not sure I like my own playing that well. I've come up with a few things that I still like, but I think I'm too obvious. I don't really care for busy bass playing for the sake of being busy. In my opinion there's kind of a fine balance between contributing something to a song, and sort of over doing it, especially when people who aren't talented enough to breakout of some conventions try to be flashy.

Danielle and I were in the car listening to the I'm Not There soundtrack when I heard the greatest electric bass playing of my life, on Mira Billotte's cover of As I Went Out One Morning. When we got where we were going I looked up the player in the liner notes, it was Tim. I tracked him down and got him to agree to record for us.

He recorded direct at a friend's house in NYC, and then we sent the signal through a vintage Ampeg set-up at Metrosync, mic'ed up with a Neumann U87 as well as another mic that I don't remember, but I don't think we used it in what we've mixed so far.

I hope Tim will play on everything I record for the rest of my life.

We also did drums on three songs two weeks ago. I had high hopes that an old friend would be able to play, but it didn't work out time wise. Paul Samuels helped us out, and it ended up being a great fit. Paul is primarily a jazz drummer, he teachers in Oberlin's jazz studies program.

For the most part we mic'd things up in a very minimalist way. If you search youtube for 'recorderman' you'll find some videos of a guy demonstrating a two mic technique for drumset. Trying in part to capture the feel of old jazz records, we set up our overheads according to the directions (one over Paul's right shoulder, and one more traditionally more or less above the hihat). We did add two other mics, one on the kick, and one on the snare, so we would be able to add a little reverb to the snare independent of the rest of the sounds. For 'In Small Portions' we also set up a pair of room mics in opposite corners of the tracking room (which is quite large). I kind of wanted the sounds of the drums on Elliot Smith's Everthing Means Nothing to Me, although the style is a quite different, as Paul played with mallets. That song is the hold up to finishing the project, as it's going to require some intense mixing.