Songs of Wanderlust: Studio Notes
Looking back at lessons learned from over 2 years in the home studio 2020-2023
The album cover art from “Songs of Wanderlust“ which combines hand stitched elements from a the custom suit I commissioned from Judith/Rose Cut Clothing in LA.
One of the main reasons I’ve committed to taking studio and recording notes, is that I’m so forgetful. Legendarily forgetful, I also happen to be fascinated by what lies under the hood of the recording process. I’m a gear-head (in another lifetime a software designer/developer), as much in love with the technical aspects of sound and recording as the creative process of capturing lyrics and melodies from the ether. It’s proved useful to know which guitar, amp, FX, and plugins were used to achieve any given sound, just in case you want to get back to that place.
As a disclaimer, I’m not an electrical engineer, a studio engineer, or a licensed engineer, that was my pops. Buzz O’Donnell was a mechanical engineer who built and serviced massive industrial cooling systems for power plants, refineries, ect. He was a bad ass. I’m just an artist who bullshitted his way into tech during it’s wild-west era. Most of us were self-taught, and the things we now take for granted had not yet been invented. During this era, affordable home studios made cosmic fire accessible to mortal man.
The learning curve (for recording/live sound) is steep, but it’s part of being competent in our trade, just like memorizing the lyrics or the songs on our instruments. Art is path of continuous improvement. Self expression (for me) is taking ownership of my own voice, curating every aspect of it. My name is on the concert posters, the singles, the albums, because I own the music, the sound, and each performance (for better or for worse). Understanding how to work an amp, a mic, and a PA or home studio is about accepting the responsibilities of ownership. I say this knowing full well there are some things I will never understand, so I leave those tasks to technical professionals. This brings us to the doorstep of songwriting and recording.
Recording “Songs of Wanderlust” started right on the heels of me completing my first album, “To Love a Wild Fire”. My normal process is music first, with at least a single verse and a chorus, and track vocals at the end. Often skat over the chord changes to establish the lyrics and melody. I tracked “Motor Kine” with my good friend Lee Knight and his buddy Dean Smith (on slide) who played with Capt. Beefheart in the 70s. These two guys were fun to work with. Lee mixed and contributed bass parts to my entire first album masterfully. I probably wouldn't be writing this or releasing anything had it not been for Lee’s help. Another collaborator was Bill Skibbe (of Third Man), who mastered the album, another really cool person I hope to work with in the future.
Lee was a great singer. As such, he took special care in combing through the stems like a neurosurgeon, he shed light on my recorded voice in a way that allowed me to come to terms and understand the tools I had to work with. Up until then, I hated hearing my voice in recordings. We discussed letting my vocal mistakes be there for all to see (and hear), warts and all. It takes a lot of work to produce natural sounding vocals from a performance, I saw him at work. I know he corrected so much finitely in Melodyne, and I appreciate it because you don’t hear the corrections. After the first album, Lee was luckily available to complete the next few studio sessions, with Dean. Dean’s session guitar slide work was a virtuosic lesson in standard tuning slide (3 more unreleased songs from those sessions).
Listen to Dean’s work here, “Motor Kine“ just scroll down the album and click play: https://www.therammusic.com/music-list/
Another, highlight of “Motor Kine” was the swinging upright bass playing of Marco Savoia (local San Diego musical legend). Now that I think of it, the first time I met him we played “Motor Kine“, he stomped his boot so hard on the stage along with the bass, I thought he’s put a hold through the floor. Shortly after our first meeting, I hired him to do some session work. I recorded Marco on a number of songs at the time using his bridge pickup through a DA box into the Hi-Z input of the Universal Audio x8p Apollo system, and a Townsend Sphere mic (now UA, Townsend was purchased by UA) on the neck of the bass. The sound is amazing, so many of those songs are still unreleased. I use the sphere mic, and related plugins also on all of my vocal tracks of this era, still do.
The “Motor Kine” recording was right there when I was set to take on the world, my first album behind me, a single ready to promote live with a shit hot band, but the world had another plan. Covid killed live music that spring a few days before our first show. Let’s fast forward to the winter of 2021-2022, and move on to the other songs.
While “Motor Kine” was very much tracked traditionally in the studio, with each instrument individually recorded, the next songs came from an experimental single practice session at the home studio in late 2021. The first of these experiments resulted in my “Sessions” EP, released on the last day of 2021. Once I knew how too record the entire band live, as a follow up, I arranged for the band to show up in early 2022 and play back to back takes of the songs we were playing out at gigs. This is how we tracked “Do It Right”, “New Day Dawn”, “Cut Loose“, and “Ragtop Car”. It was in the home studio, with a fridge full of beer playing back to back takes with the entire band.
By this time, I had racked up so many failed home recording sessions that my expectations were quite low. With the Universal Audio Apollo system, I finally had a studio quality setup, and the results were improving. I was starting to enjoy producing the music I wrote, hiring musicians, engineers, while providing direction for them to add what I could not to each song
The second I heard the bass kick in with the drums on “Do It Right”, I remember how good it felt. I still do, the song just moved, leapt out of the speakers, was a living beat, I knew we captured the raw essence of one of my oldest songs. To my surprise, the signals on each track were clean, with minimal bleed, all I had to do was clean it up a bit (but not too much) to make it sound over produced. Another experiment we did was that we ditched the click track during these sessions. As I was tracking, I just thought “What if?“, “What will happen if?“
If a groove works, there’s no need for a click track. Number one rule in music, there are no rules.
Click tracks? Music only started using click tracks in the 1980s, plenty of good music has an organic tempo that ebbs and flows. If Elvin Jones was still alive, do you think a producer would make him play to a click track? Nope. If you’re Intrested, Logic Pro X has a feature that analyzes adapts the project tempo to the instruments being recorded live. As the song progresses, you can see the slight variation in tempo as we move from verse, to chorus, to bridge, and so on. I believe the feature is called Smart Tempo or Adaptive Tempo, I’ve found it to be reliable except for when I try to synch with a video of the same performance. If your release is purely audio proceed fearlessly, just know that cutting and pasting all over the project becomes impossible. That’s kinda the point, living with the take and the performance and not over producing something until it’s dead.
Smart Tempo here at the top of the picture in project in Logic Pro X. This projects is a recorded live show we did using a QSC Touch Mix 8’s recording capabilities.
Another thing I learned…
If you intend to release a live music performance video with mixed music from the board, you’ll find yourself endlessly syncing the video with the audio if your project uses adaptive tempo or Flex Time. Set a fixed temp for your mix before importing the stems for the mix down, I found this out the hard way. Seems the variable adaptive tempo stretches and condenses the tracks as it analyzes them, so it would be best for you to use a fixed tempo in your audio projects that will be released as video of the live perfomance. Regardless of what your feelings are on the matter, Logic’s adaptive tempo is a very powerful tool for the analytical composer.
OK, back to session tracking. To reiterate, I had just purchased my first Universal Audio Apollo x8p, routed drums, keys, guitar, vocals, and bass into the system to road test my hardware investment. All instruments ran direct in silently so we could capture a clean take of the drums. We all wore headphones and played as a live band during the sessions, and tried to keep the overdubs to a minimum. I enjoy this way of recording as it’s very close to being on stage. True, there’s a chance I would have to re-take a few of the instruments, vocals were a SM58 scratch track, and the guitar parts often missed their mark, but this type of post-production editing is easy. It’s like capturing the shot in film.
Most of my overdubs were straight forward, take stacks of vocals, keys, guitars, and whatever soloist was involved. What became glaringly obvious, was that the bass and drums needed no overdubs (as always), flawless. Those boys are a wrecking crew. In the spirit of studio experimentation, I may have engaged in some snare doubling using digital kits, but it was just added sugar to the already established groove. Playing bass now was my friend Dan Greenbaum, on a Reverend dub king with flat wounds, direct into an Ampeg classic stack plugin. On drums, Mike Hunt plays a Ludwig Questlove Breakbeat kit, with a standard sure drum mic setup. The guitar parts were mostly performed on my red Gibson ES335 (Rich Robinson signature model), through a Vox AC30 head connected to a single 12” greenback and Universal Audio’s OX cab emulator. I think that the recent purchase of the OX was the impetus for the recording test in the first place. It’s a cool little machine, way better than having a long speaker cable routed to a cab in the bathroom (another one of my epic fails). My goal was to run the entire band silently, while playing together with the intention of capturing pristine drum tracks with zero to no bleed. It worked.
The ES335 in action, Ocean Beach, CA. Nothing sounds like a 335.
Now that I spent some time of the rhythm section, let’s talk about the solists. Some of the coolest results during these session were when we overdubbed the keys using a Nord Electro 6. It’s the keyboard of choice my friend Mike Pritchard plays when he adds his wizardry to the band. There are so many interesting tones to choose from on those keyboards, it really opens everything up to a world of endless possibilities. We can go Stevie Wonder Clavinova, to to church with a gospel organ, explore 70s prog rock, and so much more. During these sessions, we decided to pan two separated sounds I believe a Rhodes style trem and an AutoWha as two separate takes (rhythm and lead) into the left and right side of the stereo signal. I may have written these songs, but Mike give the songs life. “New Day Dawn” is entirely dedicated to Mike’s mastery on the keys, he’s completely unpredictable with a jazz feel, “Ragtop Car” is a continuation of that fun. I love playing with him, he keeps all of our ears sharp.
Here’s the actual recording of the keyboard takes split in half to make the background to the official music video:
The Ram - New Day Dawn ft. Mike Pritchard, Mike Hunt, Dan Greenbaum
Once tracking was near complete on my end, it was time for me to once again seek out the skills of a professional sound engineer.
Around this time my friend Lee moved so he was no longer available, so I needed to find a replacement. Moving to a different engineer, kinda scared the shit out of me. Fortunately, 3 or 4 of my musician friends gave rave reviews of a local engineer named Mike Butler. Most of my favorite local bands have recorded with Mike, and fortunately for me, he’s mixed and mastered near everything since my first album.
Looking back, we started with “Motor Kine“, and I loved how it came out. Marco swings the hell out of that song, I can hear his foot kicking a hole through the floor every time I hear it. It was an amazingly fertile time of creativity. In spite of the specter of Covid, new music was flowing like a river. I was remotely sending Mike all the stems via Dropbox, with detailed notes. As quickly as I could record, I had in my hands a mix/mastered track ready for release.
The upright bass session work Marco completed began taking lyrical shape in my mind. One of those songs was “So Lucky“. I had a studio live version, along with an unplugged version featuring upright bass, keys, and my National Steel Resonator. I made the decision to finish and release both, thank god I had an engineer like Mike keeping me honest. “So Lucky Unplugged” and the “Sessions” EP, were as much as a leap of faith as my first album. I was still figuring myself out. These songs represent the natural progression of an artist who was completely unsure of himself (still massive stage fright during shows), but was not afraid to publicly fail when performing a brand new song. I definitely had a few ‘what the hell did I just do?’ moments around the time of these releases.
In retrospect, I think Mike’s collaboration help me start to trust myself. He also taught me to simplify my approach to recording. I still second-guessed every take, every mic choice, and just about every lyric up until that point. Let’s be honest, indecision is debilitating. A songwriter who’s afraid to commit is worthless to himself, and to his art. The experience of tracking and releasing “Motor Kine“ though “Songs of Wanderlust“ allowed me to trust in my music, and trust in those around me who help breathe life into my music.
What I like most about Mike is he’s zero bullshit. Every interaction with him expedites the task at hand towards a solid mixed and mastered release. As mentioned above, I started working with him during lockdown and finally got to meet him in person at one of the Rambles he runs with songwriters in San Diego. He’s a bandleader, plays the hell out of the guitar, runs a tight studio, and is a damn good writer to boot. Check out his sub stack:
Along with “Do It Right”, “New Day Dawn”, “Join Along“, and “Ragtop Car” Mike finished off engineering duties for my last single released in 2022, “Outside the City’. This song (“Outside the City”) is a bit of an outlier on the album purely in the fact that it’s just me on bass, vocal, guitar and programmed drums. I was playing around with Hendrix’s style of hammer-ons and chord progressions, and the words just came out. The song came fast, on the day I read about the shooting in Uvalde, TX. My grandmother Dorothy was a grade school English teacher, I thought of her and all the other women whose hearts could be heard breaking out loud that morning. I dedicated it to my first cousin Bob Mestayer, one of my all time favorites. I made the music video on the family farm in Pennsylvania when I flew back for his funeral. I will always remember the good times, love you Bobs.
The last two songs off the album come with a changing cast. “Cut Loose” is another outtake from the studio live sessions mentioned above. What makes it unique, is that it was my first song to showcased Aaron Brownwood on pedal steel. We recorded the rhythm section live in the studio and I rewrote the lyrics to pay tribute to my Aunt Sally. Aaron’s solo work takes me back to the years I lived with my aunt and uncle in upstate New York. I love him for doing that song, and the memory of my girl so right. Within the first few bars of that recording session, a smile of satisfaction broke across my face and it hasn’t left since.
I’ve mentioned two of the soloists on the album, Dean Smith’s scorching slide guitar and Aaron Brownwood on pedal steel. I can’t forget about my dear friend David Ondrick (on Saxophone) who I met as a bartender in Brooklyn, NY in my early 20s. We were both kids, we ended up forming a jazz band together (another story). He can be heard on “Do It Right”, and a few other cuts off the first album. In 2023 Mike Halloran, a local San Diego DJ legend gave me Aaron’s contact information when I started looking for steel players in San Diego. I needed pedal steel for the “Me and My Uncle” cover from the “Ram's Dead, Vol. 1” album which comes out on November 17. I cold called him, explained my situation, and I’m a better man for it. He’s now a good friend.
As mentioned above, the first time we met it was one take, another just for posterity, and we were done. Perfection. By the time we had just finished all of the pedal steel parts for “Ram's Dead, Vol. 1”, I wanted to see if the steel would work on “Cut Loose”. I’ll never forget the feeling of hearing Aaron breathe life into a song that meant so much to me. Another two perfect takes. I think with the release we ended up playing both takes at the same time panned left and right, similar to what I described with mixing the keys earlier. I asked him to sit in with the band, and it’s a dream come true. I’ll get to the band later.
“It’s a Saturday Night” is the last (but certainly not least) of the songs. It’s a banger, easily my favorite single from the album. There’s little to mention about the recording of this single that hasn’t been said about the others. I played the ES335 through a Vox/OX, the bass parts, and programmed drums. The song’s chordal structure is very similar to “So Lucky” from my “Sessions” EP and “So Lucky Unplugged“. I love every thing about this song, from the building bass line, the complimentary guitar melodies, to the bombastic chorus. The first time I performed it live on stage, I ended up dancing. I still need to learn to play this song live, inside musician’s joke.
Taj Mahal always talks about dancing while playing music, you can hear it in his music. Performing “It’s a Saturday Night“ at a local club.
Back to present day 2023, it feels like a few lifetimes lived during the recording of this album. Trying to recapture everything is almost like trying to put lightning in a bottle, sounds impossible, but is a great metaphor for music. When I write, it helps me process what happened while and gives me time to think out loud. Writing about process, helps me understand what happened, why it went right, as well as the road bumps along the way. All and all it’s been an amazing learning experience.
Right around the time these last two songs were near complete, I met Tommy Richardson of the Jankeys, and sound/lights for the Belly Up. We hit it off immediately, so I had him mix and master my 2023 recording sessions. He reminds me of one my siblings, just cool to the core. Between Tommy, Mike, and Lee, I feel fortunate to have had such solid engineers in my corner. I believe in any line of work, we are only as good as the people touching shoulders on either side of us. Studio engineers and live sound engineers are as critical to making music as the artist themselves. I feel like they’re very much a part of the band.
Speaking of, I also have to thank my close friends in the band who help me perform live. Mike Hunt is my brother from another mother. I’ve played music with him as long as I can remember. Behind the drums, I never have to think about where he’s headed just look over and he’s always right there, getting the song where it needs to be. It’s effortless synching with his beats, and his arsenal is endless. His brother Donny is one of my best friends, hands down. They’re both family.
On keyboards, Mike Pritchard is an unstoppable force of nature. His creativity is not only awesome to watch, every time he plays it takes me to outer space. For all of his onstage funky cool groove brilliance, he’s one of the most down to earth people I know. He reminds me of my brother Tommy, so cool, so laid back, so much the glue that brings people together. He’s the glue that makes the music stick. His ear is pure jazz, it’s freedom.
Complimenting this maestro, magician of sonic wonders is another friend Dan Greenbaum. Everything Dan plays, swings, and every room he walks into is a good time. I used to get so worked up about playing live, but when I’m standing next to Dan, I calm down (‘cause I know it’s alright). I don’t have to work as much, while wanting to work twice as hard as I ever have. Dan could probably out play ever single one of us in our instruments, and when he hits the bass it makes the girls shake their tails. What a cool brother.
That’s my current band as it now stands in the fall of 2023, along with Aaron Brownwood, we’re a collective of solid creative individuals. We sound tight live, and usually have a ton of fun together. With a little luck 2023/2024 will be a productive recording season. I’ve already recorded a tone of live shows last summer, and am speaking to Mike Butler about how to proceed with a live album, and something else that for now I need to keep on the down low.
Cheers, for now. Releases on October 20 and November 17, going to be a busy few months for me.