Birth of a Music CD
By Bob Blackshear
For years I have been interested in producing a Country/Bluegrass Gospel music CD. Knowing that I would retire on August 2, 2005, I saved a few dollars ahead so that I could start recording as soon as I could break away from my x-ray job at Austin Regional Clinic in Round Rock, Texas.
This particular recording might be described as a seminal venture toward the birth of a dream—a dream to create a full fledged musical production with recording studio, vocals, several instruments, CD duplication, advertisements, and all.
My good friend and gifted banjo player, Bob Haydon, informed me that his all instrumental bluegrass CD cost him around $16,000.00. I flatly knew that I wouldn’t be financially able to even approach such a figure on my upcoming Social Security budget. I’d have to depend on my meager savings and the selling of some assets to reach just under half Haydon’s expenditure.
If anyone is going to record anything the magnitude of a musical CD, he must have a repertoire of no fewer than ten songs. He must have some good notion of where the recording is to take place and how much they charge per hour. Next, the producer—whether he is the one who pays all the bills, or the artist who has the dream—must have a clear plan about what he wants to accomplish during that first recording session.
By August of 2005, I had amassed twelve songs I wanted to record. My bass player, Tim Simpson, had thoroughly rehearsed his part from a simple cassette tape I sent him earlier. My plan for the first session was to record the melody vocals and the bass line for half of the songs. Tim and I coordinated our efforts well, and things went as planned. This gave me encouragement for the next session to follow in several weeks.
When it came time for the second recording session, Tim didn’t show up on time. Worried that he might have been involved in an accident on his way from Lake Buchanan, I called him on my cell phone. Finally reaching him, I learned that he and his wife had been held over longer than anticipated in order to finalize their purchase of a sleek, black Jaguar sedan. Though ten minutes late already, he apologized up and down and promised to get to the studio as soon as feasible.
After arriving at the studio, Tim got his equipment set up. We were about thirty minutes late getting started. At $40.00 an hour for recording time, the engineer didn’t care if we were late or not; he still charged me from the time I scheduled. And what I thought would be a session that would see us through the preliminaries of the main vocal and bass parts, turned out to be a semi-disaster.
Tim, not being well rehearsed and thinking about his new car, only got through two of the final seven songs before I had determined to prematurely stop the session. While trying not to show my feelings outwardly, I wrung my hands and gritted my teeth inwardly. I didn’t say anything about my disappointment. Tim could see it in my eyes and promised to be well practiced for the next session, which came off without a problem.
The vocal harmonies came next. I only had myself to contend with, which meant cracking on the high notes and struggling for the low notes. I did pretty well in between.
The project started to take shape, but I had to do a great deal more in order to get a professional sound. It became necessary to obtain experienced instrumentalists to give a full sound to my recording. All I had from the embryo of my vision at that point was a skeleton which needed fleshing out.
A steady beat needed to permeate the whole recording so that all the other players could follow a well established tempo. Tim Simpson suggested that I call mandolin player Darvin Willhoite, who, along with his son Travis, owns a recording studio near Leander. I didn’t know anyone else to call, so I contacted Darvin and set up a recording date with him at his own studio.
Once the tempo for each track became established, my thoughts turned to the person I’d invite to play the banjo parts. I attended a few bluegrass jam sessions, hoping to run across a player with better than average ability. Nothing much came of that, just a lot of mediocrity.
But the “Fiddlin’ Fair” was to be held in September, and I knew that instrumentalists from all over central Texas would be there for that event. I met a banjo player, James Dinkins, who played for a group called “Cooper’s Uncle.” His ability to play the standard finger roll style of bluegrass banjo appealed to me as something I wanted for my album. So I approached James after his group’s set and invited him to record. He willingly accepted.
All I had to do was to set up the recording dates. Scheduling became a little difficult because James worked all day as a residential designer and couldn’t record until the evening hours. It took three evenings to finish the banjo tracks.
At that point in the prenatal process, things started to take shape, but I needed a good fiddle player. Good fiddle players have been tough to find because most of them already had other work lined up. I’d heard of a group called the Central Texas Bluegrass Association. So I looked them up on the internet and asked if they knew any good fiddle players who might be interested in recording on my CD. They were most helpful, because a day or so after my inquiry, I received several e-mails from fiddle players. I settled on Mary Hattersly, known by the Austin music scene as “Sweet Mary.” She has taught violin for many years and has played with many country/western and bluegrass bands.
Another instrumentalist on the top of my wish list was a Dobro player. For that position I obtained the superb talents of Greg Lowry, who applies his gift as a sign painter on occasion so that he can afford to play his music when he wants to.
A Dobro is a six stringed guitar which is played horizontally. The player uses finger picks on one hand to pluck the strings, while his other hand holds a three inch metal bar which he slides up and down along the fret board. It’s the kind of guitar that gives that lonesome whine like a hound dog. No self-respecting bluegrass band performs without a Dobro.
After dubbing in all the instrumental parts came the final tweaking and mixing of the whole album by the engineer and myself. We sat in the studio for hours trying to digitally position everyone on tempo where problems existed. Dan Vogel, the recording engineer, performed what seemed to be minor miracles when he raised a vocal note when it was flat and lowered it when it was sharp. He accomplished some of the same thing with the instruments. Dan did his best to do what I asked him to do with each song, and he made things sound more professional by the end of the project.
But there remained one last thing to do with the recording before manufacturing the actual CD’s for distribution. The album had to be “mastered,” which meant it needed to be made “radio ready.” I employed Nick Landis at Terra Nova Audio to do that task. He digitally smoothed out all the unwanted clicks and glitches, separated each song on the disk by two seconds, and enhanced the voice levels in comparison with the instruments. What Nick did was a definite improvement over what was done in the final mix at the recording studio.
All of the prenatal preparations had been accomplished. This baby had gestated for ten laborious months. It finally was born on the final mix table at The Olive Tree recording studio in June of 2006. It was cleaned up at the mastering studio. Many more things could have been added and/or subtracted in order for the album to seem like a more normal birth in terms of sound quality. Harmonies could have been closer. Tempos needed to have been more exact, instrumentals bolder, bass lines louder, etc. The pregnant mother (the recording studio) was at a point of terminating the pregnancy. So the time came for my baby to be born, and cutting the umbilical cord of depending on the studio had arrived.
Now, all that’s left is for the proud daddy to show his baby to the world and to nurture it so that it can make a life of its own.
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