DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The Victoria Legislature building, by night.

The stage was nearly 20 feet square, large by any standard. But we filled it. We brought four truckloads of gear.

My gig inventory included:

• 1 carpet (with cage leg position marked)
• 1 kick drum, in a road case
• 2 heavy duffle bags of pedals, hardware, sticks, charts, water bottles, etc.
• 1 drum cage with 4 toms and 11 cymbals mounted (we loaded it into a pickup truck, whole, and drove it to the gig that way)
• 2 snare drums
• 1 hi-hat stand with cymbals
• 1 throne
• 1 crate of mics and cables
• 1 drum machine
• 1 ancient headphone amp (with 1 blown channel)
• 1 pair headphones
• 1 mixing board
• 1 video camera, with tripod
• 1 bar stool, just in case someone happened by with a keg of beer and an empty glass for the drummer, I guess
• 2 mic stands
• 4 mic clips
• 1 camera, which which I would shoot exactly 2 photos, only 1 of which came out
• 1 music stand
• 1 imperfect memory, guaranteed to forget at least a few song endings

Setting up the drums was a breeze, although it took five guys to haul the cage off the pickup truck and walk it around trees, over benches and shrubbery, up to the stage. Placing the kick drum and pedals, the snare, hats, and throne took little time. This is the beauty of using a drum cage, and having a band big enough to carry it.

Positioning the mics and routing the cables took longer; the rest of the band was hanging out in the grass, and I thought I might still be tightening thumbscrews with one hand while counting off the first song.

The soundman’s mixing board and snake had only 16 channels, so we couldn’t justify using nine of them to mic the kit. Therefore we sent only the kick, snare, and hat mics directly to the main board. I still wanted to mic everything individually, to make sure every nuance of every mistake I might make would be clearly broadcast to the audience. The solution was for me to create my own stereo submix of the toms and overhead mics, using a second mixing board. I sent this mix to the main board, using up just two channels. This gave the soundman the ability to put some of the tom and overhead sound into the mains, even if he couldn’t adjust the volume of individual toms or cymbals.

When we were done with soundcheck, I marveled at the number of instruments and cables and devices we’d strung together: the work of six guys for most of three hours, a mind-boggling tangle of complexity that made the simple act of walking around the drum kit a stumbling hazard. “Acoustic drums are loud enough,” you might say. No, they’re not!

LA Times: Prius Is Put on Fast Track

Facts divulged:

• In Los Angeles there is a 7-month wait for the new Prius.
• Dealers obviously aren’t willing to negotiate; they charge full sticker: $22,274 - $26,239.
• Toyota will increase production by 50% in 2005.

(Read about my Prius test drive.)

Low Morale is a series of animations portraying one man’s struggle to cope with the soul-sapping, will-to-live draining, life-force mugging, morale crushing experiences of work. Any correlation between events shown and real-life have been personally researched.

It’s sort of like Dilbert, without the laughs.

There are eight animations in all, including a full-length music video for “Creep” by Radiohead, which looks as if it could have been an official collaboration, because the tone of the song so perfectly matches the tone of the video. Warning: it’s a 9mb download, complete with ‘breakout’ game so you have something to do during the half-hour you’re waiting for the song to begin.

(Thanks to Aaron L. for the link!)

Chuck forwarded a pointer to a neat article on the recording of Synchronicity:
The Police’s “Every Breath You Take”

Synchronicity was engineered and produced by the legendary Hugh Padgham, who was interviewed for the article. So was Stewart Copeland, who recalled the peculiar approach they took when recording the drums for the mega-hit:

The kick drum is from a drum box — an Oberheim — and I overdubbed the snare drum, which is actually a snare drum and a Tama gong drum played together, one in one hand, one in the other so you get a really heavy, but cracking, backbeat. Then the hi-hat was overdubbed as a separate track. For the swooshes into the choruses, I overdubbed the gong drum with a cymbal swell played with soft mallets. The drum part was completely assembled with overdubs.

There’s a lot of technical recording jargon in the article, because it was written for MIX magazine — not a magazine you’d be able to find at the airport bookstore. But there are some great anecdotes too:

Recording the bass could be frustrating, Padgham says, when Sting wanted to play while jumping on a mini trampoline. “It sounds mad — and I have trouble recalling whether it was during Ghost in the Machine or Synchronicity, because we recorded them 18 months apart at the same place 20 years ago — but what was really annoying was, even at the best of times, with all due respect to Sting, who is a fantastic bass player, he’s quite sloppy. If you solo his bass track, there’s all sorts of fret noise and bits of dodgy playing. When he was bouncing on the trampoline, it made it even worse.”

In a sense, it’s reassuring that “dodgy” players have a shot at rock stardom. But in another sense, it’s rarely the playing that makes anyone a star — it’s the ability to write songs that sell 30 million copies.