We set the kit up and, as I had brought along a video recorder (the old type with a mini cassette) I set it up to record the action (right!). We put Gary and Aaron in Matthew's excellent drum room and I set up in the control room. I was using an Adrenalinn amp modeler just to lay down ghost tracks (which I would later re-do at home with one of my many tube amps), and I also brought my laptop-based keyboard rig. The plan was to put Ange in the booth so we could record her saxes and solos as the mood hit.
We started tracking D1 which was a hard tune and not to everyone's satisfaction, but I figured without Ange being there it made more sense to track the songs that she played a less than major role on. We ran the tune down a few times and made some revisions (making Aaron play a modified groove instead of a drum solo for example). By the time we had a few decent takes, Ange arrived so we promptly went on to Wordplay.
The reason for booking Shattered Wings was so that we could do this tune as it had an entirely improvised middle section and we would need to keep all the sax and drum parts pretty well as is. Like I mentioned, I was using an Adrenalinn (which I had actually bought used from Matthew several years earlier, indeed, it was in answering his ad, that I became of aware of his excellent studio in the first place) and although we wouldn't keep the tracks, I would need to duplicate what I had played so I would need to use them as a reference.
So we started recording and it became clear in a few minutes that Gary really wasn't into the song and even let some disparaging remarks slip past his talkback mic. I actually missed what he said, but I knew that Ange was pissed about something as she and Gary became snippy with each other. There was a long-standing issue regarding the song as Gary didn't care for Ange's vocals and felt the song itself was not really a proggy piece and belonged elsewhere. I understood his reservation about the tune itself (although not the quality of Ange's singing which was excellent), but I know when I originally wrote the music I was pretty happy with it. I loved Ange's lyrics and vocal delivery, as well as the arrangement the band had come up with so I wanted to try it. As such the job was to track as good a version as we could, produce it up and then decide if it was worth including.
As I mentioned, Gary's comments angered Ange, but all that did was put the fire under her ass and she played a killer solo. The band actually did a great take, although none of us felt Gary's heart was in it.
That was pretty well the pattern for the rest of the day; Gary played well at times, but mostly dragged his ass on the tunes he wasn't happy with. Ange was kicked ass on the songs she was featured in and Aaron, bless his soul, was and infusing an otherwise dull session with fire. As you can see from the following picture, that was mostly an uphill battle. Seated from left to right: Gary Lauzon (bass), Rick Barkhouse (friend and sometime keyboard-player), Ange MacIvor (sax, vocals and keys), Matthew (owner of Shattered Wings and engineer extrordinaire) , Aaron Clarke (sighs and drums).
We filmed a lot of the stuff but I wisely left the camera on Aaron, especially as I used a wah on a few songs and didn't want to get caught making the ubquitous wah-wah face that ALL guitarists make when using that particular pedal. It is almost impossible not to mouth the words wah-wah along the foot movements. We tracked D1, D2, and Wordplay that day, and each tune had a wah-wah face moment. So wisely, no footage of me exists, BUT we do have some of Aaron doing D2. (this version is live off the floor and has Gary on bass, me on keyboards and Adrenalinned guitar, Ange on keyboards and effected alto sax).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=ZLlGSHCl3g4
Due to the mopey session, we never ended keeping anything but Wordplay, and even at that I replaced all the bass parts. It was shortly thereafter Gary left the band, but as we all could see he just wasn't into anymore, that was expected. As I am also a bassist, it really wasn't a big deal as far as recording went, but I didn't want to end up with another album like Diagramma, where I ended up playing all the parts on several of the songs. Although I think I did a good job, it also takes a lot of the energy from a band when the album they are promoting doesn't even feature them. To clarify; Aaron wasn't in the band when I recorded the bulk of Diagramma, and Ange, Gary, Alain Bergeron and Paul Joannis and myself, weren't really a band until the first five songs were already in the can. We recorded two songs as a band but the others were just me. NOT a thing I wanted to do this time out, in fact, I was looking for the total opposite, where we would track as a band live off the floor.
Anyway, in regards to Wordplay, I wanted to salvage something from the session, so I took the piece home, added acoustic guitars, keys and bass and re-did the electric guitar. I kept Ange's vocal track, sax solo and Aaron's drums (all take 1) and used my ghost guitar part here and there. That was that and I then made a concrete decision to get a new bassist and have the band do all the other tracks AS A BAND. Here is a picture of me pretending to be a band again.
So while the session was mostly unusable, it served to make the decisions and subsequent directions easy and essentially paved the route for how we were (weren't) going to do the rest of the album.
No comments:
Post a Comment