DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

As of Saturday morning I had two songs left to record, and not a lot of time to do so — my original schedule called for tearing down the kit no later than Sunday. But my toms needed new heads and the whole kit was ready for a tune-up. I made the mistake of sitting down with my toms and a pile of heads in front of Rush in Rio. This is an old pressure-coping technique of mine, called procrastination. Forty minutes later, Neil Peart hadn’t yet made eye contact with the audience, and I’d changed exactly one head.

I powered through the rest of my head-changing and tuning without the company of aging rock stars. It still took me a half-day.

The next song on the block was called Best In Me. It presented a different sort of challenge… not one of technique or stamina so much, but of memory. The arrangement was unusual, in that bar counts were occasionally odd (e.g. the intro is 7 bars long), the vocals in the verse start on the last eighth note of the measure, and various sections are separated by a 2-count (that is, half-measure) guitar tag.

I tried the approach that worked for Cincinnati Summer, of printing an arrangement chart and singing along in my head. It didn’t work this time; I couldn’t memorize the song structure. I’d play through what I thought was the entire song, only to hear four or six more clicks from the click track — a sure sign that I’d miscounted somewhere.

Normally, I’d ask for a scratch guitar or vocal track, but this wasn’t an option, both because I was very late in the process and because the song’s author is stuck somewhere in 1978, technology-wise. I mean, I could have asked him to cut me an 8-track tape, but I’d have had to go to Goodwill to buy a deck to play it.

The solution was to record my own vocal guide track. Hey now, take your hands down from your ears. I wasn’t singing. My guide vocal was a recitation of the section names and bar counts, a sort of voiceover for the song. It worked well, although double-checking that my guide was accurate to the demo was tedious. Had I made a mistake in the guide track, the other guys in the band would have had to rewrite their parts to fit a skewed drum pattern.

Best In Me (drums only, rough mix, dry) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn)

My performance would have benefitted from a couple more rehearsals. The final take doesn’t groove quite as well as it should. Solo’d, it works, but I was feeling the time slightly behind the beat, which may not work for this tune. Also there are a couple subtle timing errors that are a testament to my not being in the right space for this particular session. That, or maybe I was constipated, because that’s what the choruses sound like. The groove has a lot of 16th-note interplay between snare, kick, and hi-hat, and the more I listen the more I think it’s not smooth enough.

The question now is, can we “fix it in the mix?” Stay tuned.