Tales from the Studio
Or: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Hit Rewind and Try Again
By Peter Hanson - Photo by Joe Putrock

For musicians everywhere, the studio seems an almost mythical place. It’s where the Beatles changed the rock & roll landscape by recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It’s where Brian Wilson merged pop and classical and a zillion other things when he made Pet Sounds. It’s where Kurt Cobain started a revolution by creating Nevermind. Because recording an album has such heady connotations, going into the studio can be an intimidating process.

Paul Maceli has been through the recording process twice with area prog-rock band Acoustic Trauma, and he says the trick to making studio work go smoothly is to know what you’re doing before you start recording. “It has to do with a lot of practice, I suppose,” he says. “We just play the songs so often that when we get into the studio, it’s almost like clockwork. It’s about making the live performances so tight that when you get in the studio, you try not to let those headphones and all that stuff get in the way. We just do the same thing we do live, with the exception of not knocking stuff over.”

Despite how simple he makes recording sound, Maceli acknowledges that the process takes patience—especially when people start making mistakes because they’re tired, stressed-out or both. “We have a joke where we put our hands together and we breathe in and breathe out and say ‘fo-cus’ like what’s-his-name, Mr. Myagi [from The Karate Kid],” Maceli says. “Everyone laughs, and then we go, ‘Let’s hammer that out.’ ”

At least Maceli has the luxury of bouncing ideas off his band mates, and the chance to relax while other players work on their parts. When Albany indie-pop artist John Brodeur recorded his first solo album, Tiger Pop, he played every instrument himself and had only producer John Delehanty to keep him company. “I played drums for a long time before this, but really trying to nail the drum parts perfectly was a completely different thing from playing with a band in high school,” Brodeur says. “Little things like that were wake-up calls.”

Whereas Acoustic Trauma were able to perfect their songs in concert before heading into the studio, Brodeur faced the challenge of expanding songs that he had only performed acoustically into full-fledged recordings. This challenge was exacerbated by his musical ambition, because Brodeur wanted to create dense arrangements with several instruments working off each other.

“You get a sound in your head, and you start working on it, and it morphs a little,” he says. “It never really comes out quite like you picture it. There were a couple of songs that ended up not making the record because I wanted to do a string thing, and to use keyboards [to simulate strings] just doesn’t sound right—at least if you’re a purist like me. Although we did use a couple fake things, like xylophone-type sounds, that were keyboards. Those were manageable. They actually sounded kinda real. Most of that record was just experimentation. If one thing didn’t work, we tried something else.”

Experimentation is a luxury that a lot of musicians can’t afford, because if they go into a professional studio, they’re constantly aware that the clock is ticking and that the hourly rate for the room and the technicians isn’t getting any smaller. In both Brodeur’s and Maceli’s cases, they made the recording process reasonable by working with their friend Delehanty, whose studio is in the basement of his mother’s house. Yet some musicians go even further than that, by creating their own in-home studios.

Mike Campese, an area guitarist who records everything from rock to jazz to acoustic music, uses a Macintosh computer and a sequencing program called Vision to create basic tracks at home. He plugs his guitars and keyboards and drum machine into the computer, then takes the basic tracks into a professional studio for mixing. While Campese still uses traditional techniques—he says half of his last album, Full Circle, was recorded in a professional studio—he values the ability to work on basic tracks whenever he wants to, and for as long as he wants to.

“I don’t go overboard with it,” he explains. “I try to keep it to like 16 tracks. I’ve done stuff with just eight tracks. I try to keep it simple, because, live, you can’t really pull it off if it has 30, 40 tracks. It does sound a little bit better [when you record] in the studio, because the studio’s designed for live playing—you have your amp cranked up, there’s drum boots and vocal boots. . . . You do lose the quality a little bit working at home.”

And sometimes, musicians can lose more than quality if they aren’t careful. “I had a tune and I freakin’ compressed the file—you compress the file to save space—I compressed the file and it was gone,” Campese recalls. “I was, like, ‘Oh my god!’ You gotta back everything up. I lost some really awesome stuff because the computer just all of sudden erased it. That’s the not-good thing.”

For musicians like Campese, the process of recording at home is essentially a downsized version of recording in a fully equipped studio. But for some musicians, such as area experimentalist Jim Sande, recording at home is a natural choice—because the composing and recording processes are intertwined. Sande sculpts his music from layers of electronically created sound, so it’s not as if he can play the songs in a nightclub and then head into a studio once the songs are ready to get laid down.

“I work in a reactive manner, so that when I put down a track, I react to it, and then I keep reacting to it,” he explains. “I’ve also worked as a visual artist—I like to paint—so digital music is a very good medium for me. I equate it to the idea of making a painting. Every once in a while, I learn a new little trick or a new little skill, or work with a sampled sound. I like the digital medium. It’s ideal for me.”

Percussionist Brian Melick has a different perspective on recording, because he generally is asked to contribute to other people’s compositions, whether as a member of the McKrells or as a session musician. “In the studio, the major factor is the KIS method, as in ‘Keep It Simple,’ ” he says. “For the most part, when you’re recording a project, you look at your part and you simplify your part a lot. You dissect the part a lot more. You’re not just going for it. It can be intimidating, sure. But experience teaches you that it
shouldn’t be intimidating.”

Like Melick, Brodeur says that part of the fun of working in the studio is giving in to the flow of creativity so that new ideas can emerge. “There’s a couple songs on Tiger Pop that essentially got written in the studio, a couple of the quieter things I wrote as we went along,” Brodeur says. “They were never really finished till we finished the recording. There’s a couple little melodic things that came out from messing around with the instruments. The more the songs get built up, the more we record and come up with ideas, it actually gets more and more exciting.”

For some musicians, the worst part of the recording process happens after the actual recording is done. Whereas platinum-selling pop singers can drift into a studio, sing their parts, then leave the dirty work to somebody else, up-and-coming musicians generally need to be involved with every aspect of creating their albums. “The mastering was kind of strange,” Brodeur opines. “It’s basically just making it sound better, but I sat there and watched [Delehanty] do it, and I’m, like, hearing little differences. I guess my ears aren’t trained in the way some people’s are. It was just watching him move knobs back and forth a millimeter at a time until it sounds right, and it was really tedious.”

Maceli puts it even more simply: “The postproduction sucks. It’s a pain in the neck.”

Still, if a good vibe permeates the recording process, it may extend into postproduction. Maceli says that when he and Delehanty found themselves mixing at 3:30 AM during the creation of the Acoustic Trauma album Spirits, they got so punchy that started making odd, frightening noises with the instruments and mixing boards. They put the sounds onto the album as a hidden track.

“It’s just supposed to scare anyone who accidentally leaves their CD player on,” Maceli says. “That was actually how our minds felt, so the hidden track was just a result of a 12- or 13-hour studio session. The whole idea is you’ve gotta have fun with it, because if you get too intense, it shows in the recording. You can’t get too bogged-down, or stressed to the point where it ends up being counterproductive.”