It Hurts to Record
May 29 2009

Someone clicks a photo of you. They're using a super-hi resolution camera. 10 billion billion billion pixels. A closeup. Extreme closeup. You have no makeup. They bring up the photo on a dazzling sharp hi-performance monitor.

You look at the unretouched photo. Every blemish, blotch, bump, boil and bubble is visible. Barf.

Welcome to the recording process. Live music performance is dynamic. Notes get played, ideas get executed, the music flies by. In reality, the music is almost always replete with blemishes, blotches, bumps, boils and bubbles. Yes, jazz fans, the Pianobabbler can sometimes be the Pianobumbler.

These dweebls and grimbles in the music don't compromise its quality. Minimal grit in the oyster. And those 'live' recordings with the pristine perfect playing? Post-concert touch-ups. Count on it.

The Pianobabbler was back in the studio last week. Having decided to record a new CD (not sure why- aren't CDs dead parrots?) I decided to do my first all-trio disc.

Studio time is expensive. We had two days to get it all done. In other music formats, two days is what it takes to find the right microphone for the backup singer's replacement. But in jazz, we're quick. It helps when you have wizards like Dennis Patterson engineering and producing, Mike Downes on bass, and Ted Warren on drums.

Still, when you finish a recording, the floor should be covered in the blood, sweat, tears and toil of your music. Otherwise, it will sound safe. Dull. Yawn.

Recording equipment now is of stratospheric quality. In the hands of a Dennis Patterson, it captures everything beautifully. It's like that high-resolution camera. A sonic extreme closeup. Which means every detail is hyper-highlighted. Any fudged notes, and tentative ideas are exposed. Nothing escapes the microphones' merciless attention. Intense. Thank the gods there is editing and overdubbing.

This is nothing new. As soon as tape became a recording medium, editing and overdubbing became the norm. Recording moved away from concert replication, to a different form of music creation. Recordings from the 1950's as classic as Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue have benefited from the splice of life.

I'm happy to say that we laid down some terrific tracks last week. We worked at the music. We polished it. We made the occasional "punch" (i.e. overdub). In the end, I think we've made a super CD. But it wasn't without leaving our toil and sweat on the recording room floor. By the end, we were exhausted. We had no music left in us. Which is how it should be.

Look for the new CD in the fall of '09.

And you thought music is all fun.

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