The recent recordings I made with my son David playing drums have finally gotten me into learning the new interface in my recording software, SONAR. The X1 version had very significant changes, most of which I am coming to believe are for the better, despite meaning that I’ve had to re-learn how to do certain tasks I thought I already knew.

The other thing about it is, I realize I have done very little recording of any note for most of the last decades, and I’m also learning about things that have been in the SONAR bag of tricks for a while and I somehow missed.

In particular, there is a way to record extra passes of audio into a single track. They are called layers, and provide a nice way of grouping multiple takes together and working with them to assemble a composite performance. (For those that don’t know, a composite performance is simply editing down a series of two or more takes of a performance, picking the best parts of each track. Typically, for example, your first take will have a so-so first verse, and an excellent second verse and chorus, while the second take really nailed the first verse and the rest were a little off, etc. Rather than re-recording the entire performance over and over again until there’s one ideal take that’s as good as can be, often you edit the performances, keeping the best parts of each one.)

I’m currently working on recording an arrangement of Ray Charles’ “Unchain My Heart,” and I’ve discovered this feature while trying to get as good as vocal performance as I can, and a good guitar solo.

It was a wet, rainy weekend in the Bay Area, and spirits got even more dampened when the San Francisco 49ers lost the NFC championship. Maybe the big game explains why the 8 o’clock show at Yoshi’s on Sunday was so criminally under-attended. The room wasn’t even half full. But those in attendance enjoyed a smouldering set from Robben Ford and his band.

Ford was in fine form, if perhaps a tiny bit taciturn, as if he was mildly tired, or perhaps just a bit disappointed at the turnout. The repertoire for the evening included some of my favorites, like his version of Ray Charles’ “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” (which appears in an acoustic version on his 1998 release The Authorized Bootleg),  “Cannonball Shuffle” (his instrumental tribute to Freddie King from 2003’s Keep On Running), and “Good Thing” and “Strong Will to Live” from 1995’s Handful of Blues. The band was exceptional – Greg Mathieson on Hammond B-3 organ and Fender Rhodes piano, Andy Hess on bass, and Toss Panos on drums. Hess and Panos locked in tight as a grooving and dynamic unit. Panos in particular is an excellent foil for Robben. 

He used a volume pedal beautifully in one solo, at the end of which Greg Mathieson stood up for a moment, gestured, and yelled, “ROBBEN FORD!!!” It was a nice moment.

A great show… I wish they had played a bit longer (they were done by about 9:30) but that’s a minor quibble…

Aside for the guitar crowd: Ford was plugged into his famous Dumble amp into 2 x 12 cabinet. He stuck mostly with his old Telecaster; several other guitars were standing there waiting, but only one was used, a Gibson Firebird, for one song. His pedalboard contained a wah, a volume pedal, a Fulltone OCD distortion pedal, two TC Electronics Hall of Fame reverb pedals, a Line 6 DL4 delay pedal, and a tuner. Last time I saw him do his own thing (almost three years ago, one of the gigs recorded for Soul On Ten), he used the wah a lot; last night he didn’t touch it.

This past Saturday my son David and I convened in the family room again and proceeded to re-record the two numbers from the previous week, which had been somewhat spoiled by my careless bass part bleeding into the microphones. Over the week between I bought a very inexpensive headphone distribution box, so I hooked that to a stereo output from the mixer. I played bass direct into the board and so all that was in the ‘phones was the bass part. I also added a third mic, so I had one on the bass drum, one on the left side of the kit and a little bit away, and one on the right side of the kit up close to the snare. This time I got very usable tracks from the session. On Sunday I overdubbed a “real” bass part for each song, and on one song added a rhythm guitar part and a quick stab at a second part with some lines. They are starting to sound really nice. I’m looking forward to finishing them up, hopefully before too much time passes.

Early last year I mentioned in a post here the demise of a somewhat regular gig. I was never privy to what actually happened, but my understanding was there was a restaurant manager who had instigated the gig, and there was some sort of shakeup at the place which resulted in his departure. Since the live music nights were his doing, they ceased with his exit.

Now it seems that the management has changed (perhaps new owners?), and the departed manager has returned and has restarted the gigs. It sounds like it will be much the same as before: every Wednesday from 7-9 and every Friday from 7-10.

A pool of musicians rotates filling the seats. I had been averaging about one or two nights per month, so I expect that will continue, though it seems that perhaps the original pool of players has become a little bit depleted, so maybe I will play more often. I will be playing the first one this coming Friday, January 6th. Should be fun!

Well, it’s 2012, and after a week and a half of being off, I am back at the day job…

I wish I could say I got a lot done musically in my off time, but that would be a lie. I did achieve my primary goal, which was to set up a few microphones and record my son David playing drums on at least a couple of numbers. David’s been playing since last summer and is starting to get pretty good. I played a rough bass part along with him and the plan was to overdub a fuller bass part and some guitars after the fact. The bass bled more than I’d hoped into the drum mics, so I might not be able to do much with these tracks. Next time I’ll play through the mixer and we can use headphones to hear the bass part and thus keep it out of the microphones – either that, or I’ll just record the real bass part at the same time.

We still have another two weekends with David at home during winter break, so hopefully we’ll get in another session and get some really usable tracks.

Facing the prospect of actually, finally getting rid of my vast LP collection, I have been going through and identifying ones that I would still like to listen to again and digitizing them. To this end I bought a USB turntable to minimize the effort involved in getting them onto the computer.

Then, after doing several LPs using Sound Forge – recording each side, then opening the resulting files, running a click and pop filter on them, cutting them up into songs and saving them individually, I looked around a little on the internet and discovered a wonderful tool that cost a mere $29: VinylStudio from AlpineSoft in the UK. It makes the whole chore so-o-o-o much easier. Input the album name and it automatically names saves side 1 and 2 for you with appropriate names. Then you can download cover art and track information (titles and lengths) from your choice of online database (from Amazon, Diskogs, or several others) and it will automatically insert track markers at the appropriate places. You can easily adjust the markers if they are a little off, then clean up pops and clicks, and finally save the album in any of the usual compressed formats like MP3, or FLAC if you prefer lossless compression. It does this by creating a directory based on the artist and album title, then saves each song with the track name and the beginning and end as defined by the track markers, and with the cover art (if found) stored in the file. Just import into iTunes or whatever player you use.

Just might be the best $29 I’ve ever spent…

Facing the prospect of actually, finally getting rid of my vast LP collection, I have been going through and identifying ones that I would still like to listen to again and digitizing them. To this end I bought a USB turntable to minimize the effort involved in getting them onto the computer.

Then, after doing several LPs using Sound Forge – recording each side, then opening the resulting files, running a click and pop filter on them, cutting them up into songs and saving them individually, I looked around a little on the internet and discovered a wonderful tool that cost a mere $29: VinylStudio from AlpineSoft in the UK. It makes the whole chore so-o-o-o much easier. Input the album name and it automatically names saves side 1 and 2 for you with appropriate names. Then you can download cover art and track information (titles and lengths) from your choice of online database (from Amazon, Diskogs, or several others) and it will automatically insert track markers at the appropriate places. You can easily adjust the markers if they are a little off, then clean up pops and clicks, and finally save the album in any of the usual compressed formats like MP3, or FLAC if you prefer lossless compression. It does this by creating a directory based on the artist and album title, then saves each song with the track name and the beginning and end as defined by the track markers, and with the cover art (if found) stored in the file. Just import into iTunes or whatever player you use.

Just might be the best $29 I’ve ever spent…

For the first time tonight I tried playing in a trio with electric bass and drums. Yikes, is it hard!

The classic jazz trio is piano/bass drums. A piano player has ten fingers with the same basic function – to hit notes – and the nature of the instrument means they can play rich harmonic accompaniment while also playing lines. But even the most amazing adept guitar players are limited by the nature of the instrument to six notes and the separate and different function of the hands (five fingers of one hand fretting notes and the five fingers on the other hand striking them to make them sound).(Of course I’m referring to standard 6-string guitars played in more-or-less standard ways.) So a guitarist in a trio has to kind of pretend a bit to suggest musically what a piano player can do pretty readily. The best ones are adept at breaking parts down in such as way as to give the impression that there is harmony going on all the time while in fact they are alternating between playing lines and playing chords. It’s a kind of aural sleight of hand.

I am not even in the Little Leagues when it comes to his sort of playing and I was pretty chastened by the experience, but it wasn’t a total failure, and I think it will be fun challenge to continue to try to play like this. Conclusion: I must be more than a little insane.

I’m excited about the first three months of 2012:

• In January I’m going to see Robben Ford at Yoshi’s in Oakland
• In February I’m going to see Leo Kottke at Yoshi’s in San Francisco
• In March I’m going to finally see Bela Fleck and the Flecktones at the Warfield

The latest edition of the Golden Gate Blues Society newsletter (Issue #11, October 2011) has a review I wrote about the Ruth Davies’ Blues Night concert I saw this past summer.