My Dear Diary...

"When I Say Stop!, You Say Hey!"

Last Week’s Bonus Round: Wildflowers is the second solo studio album by American musician Tom Petty, released on November 1, 1994. The album was the first released by Petty after signing a contract with Warner Bros. Records (where he had recorded as part of the Traveling Wilburys) and the first of three albums produced by Rick Rubin. The album was certified 3× platinum in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America.

In 2020, the album was ranked at number 214 on Rolling Stone's Greatest Albums of All Time list.[12]

Wildflowers was credited only to Petty and not to his usual band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers because, in Petty's words, "Rick [Rubin] and I both wanted more freedom than to be strapped into five guys."[13] Nonetheless, the Heartbreakers predominantly served as the musicians on the album….

…The title track, while not released as a single, charted at #16 on the Billboard Hot Rock Songs chart[16] and at #3 on the Billboard Lyric Find.[17] and became one of Petty's most streamed and popular songs.[18][19] Credit: Wikipedia

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In Memorium: David Crosby of Crosby, Stills, Nash And Young fame has passed away at 81 years old. Condolences to his family and fans worldwide.

I may have told this story on here before, not sure. I was fortunate to see CSNY in concert some years ago. Good concert - a great moment when Stephen Stills stopped playing (I don’t remember which song) and said “Wait - we screwed that up, start over” and they did. David Crosby chimed in with, “Wasn’t me this time…” It was a great evening, made even more memorable by a female fan who, tiring of the somewhat overly exuberent, and probably equally inebriated, dancing female fan in front of her who steadfastly refused to sit down, yelled, “I didn’t pay fifty bucks to watch your fat ass all night!”

Takeaway: Live concert prices have really gone up!

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For this week, some thoughts on recording music. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my home studio, and at least a portion of that time was spent saying Very Bad Words, which went totally unheeded by my gear. I’ll leave you, gentle readers, to discover the maddening and frustrating mysteries of the Signal Chain on your own, because I am clearly unqualified to teach this subject. I will say, spend a lot of time learning from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about (hint: various user forums are sometimes accurate in their advice, but also not) before attempting to get something close to production quality results. I actually did spend a lot of time learning Logic Pro X, and from peeps who really did know what they were talking about. But apparently it’s not like riding a bicycle, because having spent a good portion of my time recently on songwriting and life and stuff, and now getting to the recording stage, I’m relearning much of what I’ve apparently forgotten. Meh, I guess it takes actual practice. Or something. Something that does not consist of pure luck, anyway. I hear the real audio engineers out there snickering, even though none of them are actually reading this. Punks.

I will say recording is a great place to relearn the old computer programming saying, “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. In this context, a great take (which always and only occurs after many not so great takes) makes the rest of the process so much better. There’s a limit to how much you can “fix” in post recording mixing, and most real audio engineers will give you a choice: do it again, but better, or settle for muddy junk. Option one is the correct choice.

So how do you do that? My process, which may or may not work for anyone else, starts with getting the timing nailed first. That means seemingly endless, unrecorded rehearsals of the song (I’m speaking solely about my music here, which is vocals over an acoustic guitar accompaniment - anything else is way out of my league) with a software drummer loop track instead of a metronome (great suggestion by my guitar instructor - who is one of those people who really does know what he’s talking about). I like the Apple Loops one bar software drummers for 4/4 time songs, my favorites being the “Essential Drumset 01” and the “Four On The Floor Drumset 01” - they’re in both Garageband and Logic Pro. Your mileage my vary, but both of these (you can have both of them running as a background loop at the same time while rehearsing) have a distinctive (to me anyway) downbeat and a little visual clock like thing on the interface that shows the beats at points on the “clockface”. I use both the aural and visual references for rehearsal to get the timing nailed - your mileage will vary. Keep in mind these shouldn’t be used on your actual production tracks - get a real drummer to overdub your tracks for that (along with another guitarist on lead, a bassist, and keyboardist if needed - also, unlike loops, they don’t work for free). While recording, instead of the software drummer loops, for timing cues I use the “Giant Beats Display” available in the dropdown menu on the “Bar Beats Tempo Time Key” area at the top center of the tracks window.

I imagine a lot of my readers right now might be thinking, “Wow, he’s having acid flashbacks of a Giant Beats Display in the sky again” or something. Feels like that sometimes (not that I actually know that feeling!) when I’m back at the recording desk, but I do use every trick Logic Pro X has to offer while recording. And it really is an affordable, and relatively uncomplicated recording tool (relative being the key word here - I admire Pro Tools users and users of other high end DAWs - way out of my league, though). That said, there is a lot of popular and monetarily successful music recorded in Logic Pro X. Just sayin’…

I’ll return to this subject in the future as I move along with my current project, but that’s probably enough for today. I do get this is sort of a “diary entry” post (i.e., “Today I insulted my signal chain again, but it remained unsympathetic and mocked me further. I shall die soon, apparently of self doubt”), but I know some of my readers will get something out of it, if only a chuckle or two…

What I’m Listening To:

Bonus Round: It was live, and a long time ago, but magical…

Cheers and keep playing!!

Michael Acoustic