Back To Ampersand Index PAGE 5 - The Drums - DRUM KIT: I do not want to say very much about the actual drum performances themselves, as they are not my own, but I will mention a few things that I think are exceptional. It was not my original intent to have Paul play drums on this record because A. I didn't know him personally when I started the record, and B. even after I knew him for a few years, I didn't think of asking him to play on this collection of songs I didn't take very seriously and never really thought of releasing or completing. Over the years I did have a few other drummers listening to embryonic versions of the songs and writing some drum parts, but it never really amounted to anything. When showing Paul some of the developing tracks in early 2005, he asked me if I wanted him to play on them, and I of course said yes. I realized later that because of how much time we've spent together (whether playing, talking, mixing, listening, or hanging out) Paul largely represents the musician behind what I think drums should sound like. For almost all of 2005, Paul was either very busy or on tour. I tried not to bother him with it very much and continued to work on the project, leaving room for an invisible (and proposedly very focal and featured) part of the record. In mid-December of 2005, Paul mentioned to me while I was at his house, "Hey, do you still want me to play on your record?" and so, a few days later on December 20th, I returned with an external hard drive and high hopes. I recall that it was actually an extremely casual and uneventful day. When I arrived at his house, we did whatever we usually do when I first come over: show each other new CDs/DVDs and talk about whatever is going on and then we began tuning and miking up the drums. The first track we started was "The Tundra." Paul started to ask what I wanted stylistically, and I said, "Just do a rock thing, a Buddy Miles thing for the first half, then it'll get quiet, and the second part, just play free. I'll cue you and show you what to do with hand gestures and stuff," and I hit record. So, if you keep in mind that Paul received even less instruction than that on each of the subsequent tracks, that he hadn't heard any of them beforehand, that he had no sheet music or written instructions of any kind, and only did a single first take for each of the tunes, then you should have a good idea of what the session was like (the only exception was on Crayfish, of which Paul asked me to cut 32 bars from the form that sounded nothing like the rest of the record). Due to its nature, the recording session wasn't much longer than the record itself, which left enough time later in the evening to go out and ride the local Christmas train with his family and get some Korean food. The only thing I told Paul of any significance was to play how he'd always thought of playing on somebody else's record, but wouldn't want to out of respect for them. Despite that the music is somewhat serious, the environment in which it was being made was and always is one of enitrely positive energy and humor. I'm surprised you can't hear either Paul or me laughing at many moments when he would surprise me with either a bizarre bossa nova/samba or an intentionally misleading and comic drum fill. Despite the very intentionally innovative and different sounds for the rest of the record, the drums are left relatively normal sounding. The only exception to this is that Paul left up the cymbals he had up for when his students play during lessons, as well as the rubber cymbal mutes and duct tape on them. The resulting sound was that the ringing of the cymbals on certain tracks (especially on the Tundra) was so heavily deadened that they are sometimes shorter than the sounds of the drums. This is an effect I find extremely pleasing, as cymbals not only take up an incredible amount of sonic space (which happens to also be the space which suffers the most in lower quality media) but are also usually very plain and not-dynamic, sounding like a track of uninterrupted white noise. Other artists have dealt with this by removing the cymbals entirely (think Peter Gabriel's 3rd solo album, Melt) but simply deadening the cymbals as we did left all of this extra room for other information in the upper half of the sonic spectrum, which I enthusiastically took advantage of. I have already mentioned that the record is constructed in two layers. In addition to the guitar solos occupying the top layer, the other main instrument sitting above the others is the drums. The drum sound on the record is definitely very much in line with the other retro elements of the sonic palette. Some of my favorite reproductions of the sound of a drum kit are ones where there is a single focal point which portrays it as one instrument: a single source of ideas, as opposed to a disembodied conglomerate of cymbals and drums seemingly appearing all around you (which is also really cool sometimes). It was a bold but undoubtable choice in my mind to use a single mono channel (fed by one overhead mic, one kick drum mic, and one snare mic) to reproduce the drum sound. This is nearly unheard of in modern professional recordings, which use 8-12 channels for the drums on average. This also meant that the volumes and tones of each individual part of the drum kit would not be able to be changed at any point during mixing, but I was confident that Paul's incredible control over his instrument would render this concern irrelevant (which I'm sure you'll agree it did). The drums being panned mostly to the left is also reminiscent of older rock, jazz, and R&B recordings from the 1960s and 1970s. More adventurous artists have asked me many times to pan the drums this way, copying the sound of many of the records they love, but usually chicken out after some amount of time and ask me to put them back in the middle. Especially since the drums were added so late in the production of this record, after everything else had been done, putting them in the middle obscured them quite a lot. Records have a tendency for everything to start building up the middle, the way artists often like them mixed, which doesn't really make much use of the fact that there are two channels on CDs. Having the drum kit mixed on the left and as compressed as it is was the only way I felt happy with the amount of detail revealed of Paul's amazing playing, as well as the only way it sounded like it was on the top layer with the guitar. This is also key to the reason that, in my mind at least, this record functions as a jazz record documenting playing between Paul and myself soloing on the top layer. The rest of the sounds seem complimentary to that documentation, possibly placing into a very different genre, but also giving it a far more accessible backdrop than unaccompanied soloing. The main con I've seen to the panning method I mentioned earlier is that (in Europe at least) I've seen countless couples walking down the street, each using one earbud from their iPod, which would essentially mean only one person would hear the drums, and hear pretty much only drums for an entire record. Although, I'd find it somewhat unlikely that some couple would cite a track from this record as "their song." Paul's Drums in Rat Howl Ricording Studio. Visit Paul Wertico's website at www.paulwertico.com DRUM MACHINE AND PERCUSSION: All of the drum machine sounds in the right channel come from the Cakewalk "nPulse" software synthesizer, included with their "Project 5" program. It is an extremely stripped down and unbelievably easy-to-use tool, very similar in sound and operation to an analog drum machine. I would of course run it through weird stuff to get it to sound the way it does, but I think it contrasts Paul's drum parts in an extremely pleasing and musical way. There are many things on the record which sound like percussion loops of some odd variety. In the winter of 2001-2002, I took an old VCR that didn't work anymore, miked it, turned it on, and recorded myself first taking the cover off and playing with it, then cautiously sticking a screwdriver into the moving parts, then playfully fighting it, and eventually actually ripping the entire thing into pieces. The experience resulted in a collection of very interesting sounds and scraped up hands, the former of which was very useful in making percussion tracks. I chopped the recordings into tiny pieces and pasted them into the timeline of various tunes in a musical fashion, creating rhythmic parts often sounding like alien percussion instruments. I guess this is the modern day crude method equivalent to the one Roger Waters used to create the tape loop for "Money." NEXT PAGE Back To Index