DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

For Halloween, I pretended I was a musician. I set up a drum kit and a pile of studio gear and recorded demo drum tracks for two songs, Bleed and Groove95. I sent MP3s of these to Andrew for rehearsal purposes.

Bleed was my favorite tune from the post-CD JAR days. We had only cassette recordings of the song, such as the board mix that I published here a few weeks ago. We had actually hired a mobile studio to record our final public performance, back in 1996 or whenever, but the engineer recycled our ADATs when we waited six months before scheduling the mixdown. (Although I have no CD from that performance, I did take away one important lesson: never trust the hired help with your media.)

I was able to relearn the parts for the song, but performing them cleanly was a big challenge. Wait, did I say challenge? In fact it was an enormous pain in the ass, like a knitting needle hiding in a bean bag chair, like when Dr. Jellyfinger has a hangnail, like that monster shot of penicillin the second time you caught VD. It sucked, anyway. My perfectionist nature kept me working overtime because I refused to keep any take that contained obvious mistakes. The grooves in the song are not hugely complicated, but transitioning from one to another was harder than I remember. Also, my blues band doesn’t play many hard-rock songs in 9/8 with double-bass thrash grooves behind the guitar solo, so I’m out of practice.

The old live version of the song appealed to me because it’s really “live” — I was all over the kit. At first I planned to reproduce that feel for the new recording, but it just wasn’t happening. It didn’t sound energetic; it sounded like mayhem. So I toned it down, resolving subconsciously to compensate for the missing fills by hitting the drums as hard as I possibly could. By the time I’d captured a take I could live with, I’d pounded a crater into my snare drum, like one I’ve not seen since… well, since the last time I played Bleed probably. I don’t hit that hard any more. I guess you could say I’d recorded a very faithful reproduction.

The other somewhat new challenge was recording with no scratch track. For all of JAR’s history, the drums went down either with or after a scratch guitar and/or bass and/or vocal track. I always relied on such a guide track so I don’t have to so carefully keep track of my place in the song. In this case, no such track existed. But as it turns out, the arrangement for Bleed is simple enough that I could sing the entire song in my head even while playing the double-bass thrash groove through the solo. I was pleased with myself.

Here’s the final drum performance, raw and naked. (Disclaimer: The mix is haphazard; I did no editing, cleanup, or overdubs.)

Bleed (drums only, rough mix, dry) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn)