So the name of the blog implies that I will occasionally speak of guitars as another reason I am broke. Well, probably not today either, but this will be a music-centric post.
So, as it stands, I am in a hotel room in San Juan, Puerto Rico as I write this. The band has a show here tomorrow, and we were doing a media promo tour today, starting with a TV appearance at 9am, and then a series of radio appearances. I was only required for the TV show, so came back to the hotel. I have seen everything on ebay I could possibly be interested in, and it's only 5:30, so too early for bed. Thought I'd check in on my lonely little blog. It's been a while, huh?
So, I have a recording studio. It was my main job for a while, but the industry was changing at the time I started with the band, and going on the road was steadier work. Then when my daughter was born, something blew up in my mixing console. Long story short, It has been neglected for 7 or so years. Oh, I stick my head in every few months. My partner is also my doctor, so whenever one of us has an appointment to see the good doctor, I usually hang out in the control room instead of the waiting room. But, functionally, it's been a non-issue for years.
Well, the band wants to make a new live CD to sell at shows, one that features the guys who are actually in the band now. It's been 15 years since the first one came out, and only one member in the band is on that album, so the time is right. It is planned that the song selection will be largely different, so people who have the first one won't feel cheated if they buy this one.
Anyway, with my studio in limbo, something had to be done. The band was asked to do a version of "All You Need is Love" for an ad campaign for the Ecuador Tourism folks, and so it was decided to throw money at fixing my Harrison console. Something is wonky in the audio routing, and what ever it is, caused the power supply to have major issues. I found a tech who agreed to make a housecall (a wall needs to come down to move the Harrison!), and he decided fixing the power supply was the best way to start.
While the tech was working, Mark and I went to a different studio to do the Ecuador track. It's a Pro Tools room that does everything "in the box", without a mixing console. I thought I used to be pretty fast at editing the squiggly waveform lines, but Nathan, the engineer, was FLYING through things. It was a sight to behold. Mark and I knocked out our cover of "All You Need is Love" in three days. We are still waiting to see if they use it for the campaign. There seems to be an issue with the Lennon guy in the best Beatles band in the business sounding "too much like John!"
Meanwhile, I was having an epiphany. It was the first time in YEARS I was having fun in a recording studio. I was just there to toss ideas around, and play bass (My fretless 5-string! haven't had it out of the case since 2000!), and try and keep everyone focussed on getting done before we had to go back on the road. All the stress of making it all work, and keeping the client happy was on Nathan's shoulders. It was kinda glorious.
I started looking around at how their place was set up. Very similar vibe to what I was doing in my place, but instead of a large format console with scads of history (my Harrison was originally owned by Warner Brothers' Amigo studio in Hollywood in the 70s and 80s), they had an old Mac Pro with some high dollar boutique mic pre's. My rusty gears started turning. How should I get my studio going again? Same as before? Time to bite the bullet and decide between that Otari MTR90 or the computer upgrades? And what was going on with the tech and my power suppy, anyway?
The tech was doing great work, but it was taking a while. Apparently, he is a stickler for doing it right, and unfortunately, the power supply was built in 1977, using many parts that went obsolete years ago. He tracked them all down, and even ordered extras of some, so we'll have them. Sooo....
Four months and $1800 later, the board is behaving the same way. I began trying to figure out what the trouble is, and found a resistor on the phantom power circuit that was so burned up, it crumbled when I touched it. I replaced it, and for 15 glorious minutes, my Harrison was back! Then it went wonky again. I turned it off and started doing some soul searching. How much money do I really want to throw at this?
Ultimately, I decided, not much. I haven't even used it in 7 years. We have right of first refusal on our lease for 15 years...oops, that's nearly up. What if they don't want us to stay? A doctor's office is a good, stable, steady tenant, but who can predict these things? All I know for sure, is that this console will emphatically NOT fit in my house. I have done a few projects for the band entirely in my laptop in the recent past, and while I hate not having faders when I mix, it IS possible. Time to radically re-think how our studio does things!
Having FINALLY made a decision about the console (something I have been hemming and hawing about since I got married and we started thinking about how to buy my house from my Dad), I got to work. First things first. Analog or digital? Much as I have wanted an MTR-90 since first using one in 1986, the reality is, I cannot afford tape. $450 for every 6 songs is just not going to work for me anymore. When I was just in a band, and we wanted to make a record, 2 or 3 reels for an album was hard, but possible. But now, I am used to having a studio at my disposal 24/7. I have long since stopped thinking in terms of budget for my recording endeavors. Digital it is.
Besides, let's face it. I am pushing 50. My days as a rock star have passed me by. Unless I want to spend endless hours working on music I don't like for money, this thing is back to being a hobby. And I am fully OK with that. I only wanted to be a rock star so I could afford to build a studio of my own. Somehow, I did it without the wealth or stardom. I get to live that life anyway, albeit behind the scenes, since my day job is touring with a successful show. Sure, it's a tribute band. But it's the tribute band with an attendance record at Red Rocks, and 13 shows at Carnegie Hall under it's belt.
So I am selling the Harrison. I love it and will miss it terribly, but I have already purchased the UAD plug-in that models the Harrison 32 series EQ. Bruce Sweidien endorses it, and the guy that owned my console between Warners and me says it's "very, very close." We'll see about that. It's time to pass it on to some young pup with fire in his belly, and who is on a quest for the perfect marriage of vintage warmth and current technology. I kinda don't care anymore, sad to say.
So, since I am no longer chasing that elusive "big label sound", I decided to buy a Yamaha LS9-32 to be the central element in the new, streamlined studio. Is it the best sounding console of all time? Certainly not. But it's not the worst either, and since I use the 16 channel version every night on the road, I know my way around it pretty well. Besides, I can use SSL and Harrison recreations in the computer for fidelity, the LS9 is little more than a fader bank at this point. I rarely do "live in the studio" sessions. Most things I do, require one or two mics for overdubs. I have some nifty tube-based gear for that stuff.
My darling wife, who really has no experience with this sort of thing, agreed to let my use our (hers, really) credit card to float this transition. She has never put anything more expensive than a day at Disney World on this card. I slammed $6k on it in a matter of minutes, causing her to become nauseous. To her credit, she never really freaked out at me, but I suspect she was internalizing a LOT that week....
Now I was on the hook to not only do all the work building a studio entails, but I had to pay off a sizable balance on the credit card before I woke up short of breath with a pillow on my face. What to do, what to do. Selling a large format console is not a simple endeavor, so that's not where it's gonna come from. It was time to check with my eBay buddy who sold a bunch of my camera gear last year. He came over to my studio, and we started "going shopping" in reverse. What could I sell with out defeating my purpose?
Sometime during my studio-for-a-living days, I accidently started to become a collector of vintage keyboards. It was silly, really, as I am not much of a keyboard player. I just realized one day that I had collected a veritable showroom of desirable keyboard instruments. A Hammond RT-3, a Rhodes, a Wurlitzer 200a, a Minimoog, a Hohner Clavinet. A Mellotron, for heaven's sake! But, you know, Beatle band and all that. Might need to record a version of "Strawberry Fields" someday! Plus it apparently used to belong to Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO. And why not? How many Mellotrons do you think we had in Akron, OH over the years? There ain't that many of them!
That was just some of the stuff. The stuff I knew about. When we got in the storage room, I found things I have only the vaguest recollection of buying. A Kawai SX-210 that didn't even power up. A Roland Jupiter-4, that was broken when I got it, and was just as broken 17 years later, because I haven't even LOOKED at it since we moved the studio in 2002.
You know what did best on eBay? The broken shit! Desirable, vintage compressors that adorn the racks of every major studio since 1973? $800. Totally broken synthesizer, ignored for 25 years, needs parts made from ionized unobtainium? $2000. Not that I am complaining, mind you. I thank those people from the bottom of my heart. Not only did I pay off the wife's credit card shockingly fast, but I also made enough to buy a new computer, the new interface and processing cards that were needed because said new computer rendered the ones I have obsolete. Oh, and all those wonderful vintage keyboards I used to have, that I just sold for thousands of dollars? Every last one has been replaced by a single piece of software for 300 bucks. Sure, the nuance of the real thing is probably not in the samples, but I am nowhere near the level of keyboard player I would need to be to notice. The only downside is, I haven't done anything with MIDI except make a click track since 1994, and everything I knew then related to how to hook up to a Motorola 68000 based Mac. The times they are a-changin', indeed.
So here I sit in my Puerto Rican hotel, trying to decide how to build a new patchbay for the studio, and trying to learn new areas of Digital Performer that have apparently always been there, I just never needed them before. It's rather daunting, and I no longer have the luxury of staying up all night tweaking things at the studio. I have to get up early and take my kid to school, or catch an early flight to the next show. And help the band get the new CD together, working at another studio. I haven't slept this little since my daughter was born!
But you know what? I'm kinda digging it. I forgot how much fun building a studio can be.
