I have three songs on the CD (thanks Randy!).
The Ghost of Seven Mile
White Trash Angel
Grow Up
“The Ghost of Seven Mile” is a solo effort I wrote about an abandoned psychiatric hospital near my home (slated for the wrecking ball soon). Whenever I drive past it I think about all of the messed up and painful stuff that probably happened there over the 50 odd years it was open. I intended to write a brutal punk/metal song filled with anguish and lost hope, but it turned out quite different once I got started – more of a lament about how tired that building must be after all that went on inside of it. So yeah…uh, I wrote a song about a building.
This was my “kitchen sink” song. Everybody has to do one of these to get it out of their systems when suddenly faced with 16 tracks and endless virtuals. It has most of the instruments I own on it – a number of guitars, bass, mandolin, recorder (had to “borrow” it back from my daughter, who was using it in music class), the old, out-of-tune upright piano – even the ancient Korg MS10 synth makes a very brief appearance.
The “rhythm section” is cobbled together from hand-triggered sounds from an old Yamaha drum machine, an egg shaker from the kids’ toy chest, a tambourine struck with a clave (with mucho reverb, for a “snare” sound), and in true kitchen sink fashion, various vinegar and cooking wine bottles played with metal skewers. Some parts of this rhythm approach worked, and some didn’t. Live and learn.
The vocals were pretty straightforward – a little EQ on one section, but other than that, no EQ or compression – a touch of reverb at mixdown. During the “laughing” bit you might hear something that sounds like a pitch shifted laugh. It’s all analog…..helium.
The guitar solo over the laughing section was a one take scratch track placeholder that grew on me, so I never replaced it. My daughter makes a brief cameo near the end.
The other two songs (“White Trash Angel” and “Grow Up”) are of my perennially-in-limbo band. We were called the Noose, but are changing the name due to the racially charged nature that word has suddenly taken on in the last year or two. That isn’t where our name came from, and it isn’t what we’re about. We are just a group of 40-something friends having some fun (well, our drummer is a rather young, early 30’s guy). These were my first serious attempts at recording a full band piece by piece, and I learned a lot the hard way. Drums were recorded in a sonic disaster of a basement (concrete floor and walls, very low wood rafters) using a spaced overhead pair, along with kick and snare mics. We went direct into the G with POD, Sansamp, etc. for scratch guitars and bass while recording the drum tracks (everybody using headphones). Then over the course of the next year I went to everyone’s house and gradually replaced these scratch tracks with better stuff. My brother and I play guitar – he does the lead on WTA and I do Grow Up. I’m looking forward to doing more recording of the band, but considering we can only manage to get together for practice once or twice a year, who knows when that’ll be?
These two songs represent the mellower side of the band. “White Trash Angel” was inspired by a trend in the news several years ago. It seems like there for a while, every other week would bring another news story about a missing child, with seemingly upstanding, middle class parent(s) on the news pleading for information and help. As the stories evolved, it would come out that these were people of questionable character, involved in all sorts of unseemly things, and that in the end it was actually a swinger/pedophile acqaintance that kidnapped/abused/murdered their child. As far as “Grow Up” goes, I suspect it goes to the breakup of our singer’s first marriage, but it could just as easily be about his current one I suppose. I never really asked.
Mics used include AT3035, ATM25, SM57, EV 609s, and Oktava 012 pair. I used the little Art TubeMP preamp that came free with my G on some things, but that was it for outboard recording gear. All songs mixed completely in the box on the G, through Wharfedale Diamond Pro 8.2a monitors. I didn't get the monitors until mixdown time, so all tracking was done with headphones (senn HD280).
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