Pro Sound Blog

Until last night I hadn’t picked up a drum stick for at least eight months. Truly sad, but the lame gig situation in this town and my personal and business life have gotten in the way of bashing the skins.

Last night we had one opening band and they sucked. They really sucked. By the time they finished their overly long set, they’d chased half of the mediocre crowd away.

I was worried about my chops so I played pretty straight for the first few tunes. I still have some speed and abilities, but I definitely ran into situations where my brain would send commands to my limbs to do certain complex licks and my limbs would simply misfire or just plain gag and not do anything at all.

I ran into an endurance problem toward the end of the set as well. It was a good thing we only played one set, because in the last song my forearms started feeling like they were Popeye-ing. They were seizing up!

Despite being a fairly lame crowd I still had a really great time bashing the shit out of the drums.

No Smoking!

Perhaps the best thing about last night’s gig was the fact that I didn’t have to take a shower and discard my clothes in the laundry room when I got home. For years of playing in smoky bars I’ve gotten home completely covered with a smoky stench. Now that laws have changed and no smoking is allowed in clubs, I don’t have that disgusting smoke film on my body after the gig. I wish that law would have been enacted 25 years ago.

Studio Drumming Today

I’m off to the studio to play drums for some guitar player’s solo album, then another gig tonight.

mediaguru Gigs, Musicians

Now that it is officially over I’ve been reflecting on the big hell project of 2008. There were many “come to Jesus” moments during that period and I learned a lot about myself.

I’ll have my closing reflections soon…

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One of the biggest legends in drumming died a few days ago, Louie Bellson.  Louie was one of the most incredible jazz drummers ever and gave Buddy Rich a run for his money on many occasions.

First double bass drum

Among may of the things Louie was known for was being the first guy to play two bass drums.  Even today not many jazz cats do that.

Nice

I had the pleasure of seeing Louie play live several times and I have yet to see another musician on stage who enjoyed what he was doing more than him.  Louie was well known for being a very nice gentleman, unlike the reputation that Buddy Rich had.

Louie, I’ll miss you man.  Cheers to you.  I’m sure you’re playing drums in drum heaven and still have that great smile on your face.

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I was saddened to hear that one of the most pioneering and best drummers of the 60′s and 70′s, Mitch Mitchell died. Mitchell was a bad ass drummer and laid down some of the coolest grooves I’ve ever heard on many Jimi Hendrix tunes.

I was even more surprised, and happy, to hear that it appears he died in a Portland hotel of natural causes. No drugs I hope.

Here’s to you Mitch. Thanks for all the great grooves and awesome fills. We all know you kicked John Bonham’s ass.

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This post is nine days late, but I’d like to tip my hat and a glass of wine back to Richard Wright. Richard Wright, keyboard player and founder of Pink Floyd, died from cancer at 65.

Pink Floyd is one of the all time greatest bands in the history of rock & roll and produced, IMO, the best album in rock history in Dark Side Of The Moon. Wright co-wrote five of the songs on Dark Side Of The Moon, which was in the billboard top 200 for 14 years. Man I’d love to be collecting those royalty checks.

Cheers to you Richard. Many thanks for the enjoyment I’ve gotten from your music over the years.

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A couple of posts back I wrote about the mouth breathing fiber eating drummer who shits all the time. He was to come in last week and “spend 30 minutes on a few tweaks” on the first song. He came and was very nice, offering me a king sized snickers bar (I don’t eat candy) and a starbucks vanilla frappuccino (I definitely do those). Nice gesture.

Problem

He was to come and sit in on the mix for 30 minutes to do a few tweaks. That 30 minutes ended up being over 4.5 hours. It never ends. Once again I pay in the ass for my big mistake of taking a flat fee. I don’t think I can forgive myself for that huge blunder. I never would have done that back in my full time engineering days.

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This “project” I’m working on is a comedy of errors. The keyboard player has really gotten under my skin. There’s a guy like him in most bands. He’s the one who is very agreeable yet a total lazy flake. He fakes his way through everything and puts out a half assed effort.

His assignment was to have his parts recorded and bounced down and ready to submit so we can start mixing the next songs. He supposedly worked for over a month on these tracks. I get a flash drive with his audio files on it which only contains the aliases (shortcuts for windows). He never copied the actual files to the drive, just an icon which points to the files resident on his hard drive.

Naturally he didn’t notice that these audio files, which would take several if not dozens of minutes to copy, copied in a split second. He also didn’t bother to check the drive and see if the files were there. Or did he simply click the alias which opened his internal hard drive and he didn’t know it?

Problem

Ok, so no big deal. Just get the files off his main hard drive which the aliases are referring to…right? Uh, of course not. The problem now is that the files those aliases pointed to are probably in a pawn shop somewhere, as his laptop was stolen. Yes, this guy worked for a whole month on something and didn’t back it up.

I’d laugh at this guy because he put a whole month into something and because of his own stupidity and half-assed way of doing things, he has to work another month. But I’m not laughing because it effects me. This means another fucking month of waiting around for him to get his shit done. Another month of my time. Another month of dealing with this project which should have been done months ago.

I’m tempted to pull the plug and just eject on these unprofessional boneheads.

mediaguru Boneheads, Musicians, Rants, Recording

This has been a very rough summer. In fact, this summer has changed me. I’m one grouchy mother fucker now and I’ve never been like that in my entire life. I don’t like being this way. The other day I almost assaulted my landlord. I got in a “heated” discussion with him about broken shit that has been bugging me and told him I was leaving. My grouchy attitude forced me to move which sucks, even though my new place is way better.

This summer I took on a project and made some very stupid and negligent choices in doing so. The main one being that I settled on a flat rate. Big mistake. Little did I know that this project would be several months long and that I’d be in the absolute hell of listening to a horrid vocalist who is so sharp he makes Ginsu carving knives look dull. Seriously. This guy sings entire freakin’ songs sharp and he doesn’t even know it. “Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp.” Working with this guy is like biting into rotten lemons all day. Then after spending hours on sharp vocals and doing hundreds (I mean hundreds) of takes per song, I have to go in with a pitch correcting software and fix every goddamn note. What a waste of my time, spending dozens of hours fixing some hack’s vocal tracks rather than spending time with my kids, my woman, golfing or just picking the lint out of my ass.

I can barely look these guys in the eye now for blowing my whole fucking summer and wasting my time. Damn the freakin’ keyboard player is so clueless I can’t begin to write about it. After being told his tracks would be all pre-done and ready to lay down I find out they’re not. Then, rather than doing so on his own, says he’d rather have me there to lay them down. No thought about my time, my gas or whatever. I drew the line there and said now way. It would have taken days and days to do that work he was supposed to have done previously.

That flat rate is looking pretty f’n small now since it has been spread out over months and months and months. Did I mention I had to drive 45 minutes each way for 2 months just to go listen to out of tune vocals? Bonus. Good thing gas hit $4.00/gallon right when I started this project. Perfect timing. Might as well take that flat fee and pour it down the fucking gas tank and dump what’s left into auto maintenance and repairs…

My personal life and other business ventures have suffered severely as a result of doing this gig and I’m just plain irritable as hell.

Bran for breakfast?

Now, thank God, we’re mixing. The problem is that we’re doing it at my personal residence. Now the drummer needs to come in and tell me to make his playing and his kit sound like someone other than his own. This guy is a fiber nut and eats about 1704% of his daily allowance of fiber. So he has to take a shit every 24 seconds. Freakin’ wonderful. I’ve got to go to coscto now and buy 120 rolls of toilet paper just because this bran/shit addict is invading my private space. And I wonder. How is shitting 63 times a day enjoyable?

I’m done dealing with musicians. I really mean it. I used to like engineering but I don’t anymore. It isn’t fun. It is grueling, monotonous, frustrating and insanely infuriating when dealing with amateurs. My ears have started ringing too and that has me worried.

mediaguru Boneheads, Musicians, Rants, Recording

I’m in Palm Springs in the press room covering a golf tournament. Next door the Charley Daniels band is doing their sound check. Kick drum, kick drum, fiddle, fiddle, bass, keys, and then it happened…

The guitar player started playing. The tone was perfect. The notes were perfect. He was playing “Circumstances” by Rush.

mediaguru Gigs, Musicians

It was a loooong day, 12 hours or so. We were going to start the downbeat at noon, but didn’t really get started till quite a while later. There were still tweaks to do on the levels as expected, but the drummer wasn’t tuned. He was going to get there early and be ready by noon but he wasn’t. That increased the stress level of his band mates because they have a set budget and amount of time and they can’t go over it.

Rule #1 of recording is that it always takes longer than you expect.

Crappy drummer

The drummer is fast as hell. He’s got some definite speed and skills. The reason I say crappy drummer, is that this guy is way into eating about 4075% more fiber per day than the human body is designed to take. Therefore this guy has to go take a shit seemingly between every take. At about $100/hour for this studio those are some expensive logs.

Ear fatigue

I’ve really got to take it easy with the volume. I haven’t done sessions like this for a few years and now that I’m a bit “older” I can’t take the loud levels for 12 straight hours like I used to. I need to have all these guys on headphones and keep the control room levels down. That way they can have it as loud as they want without hurting my ears any more than the decades of recording I’ve done already have.

The protools 7.4 rig started to gag later in the evening as well, leading me to the following post after this, why protools sucks #4, #5 and possibly #6.

mediaguru Musicians, Recording