GetAMentorJournals.com

Once in, of course, I have tremendous advantages. I know how to work – diplomacy, cooperation, how to shut up and deliver to a standard... I can pay attention, ask questions (when appropriate), learn procedures, and fulfill the necessary routines without resentment or flagging....

I figure I have about two decades of good work ahead of me (and thank God for an innate taste for ear-protection, all those years onsite). I’m eager to enter my next step."

March 19, 2008

I was born in Kansas City, 1954. My father was a research doctor, who taught at KSU. He later went on to oversee the research end of the Will Rogers Institute and ended up running a VA hospital in Muskogee.  My mother taught horseback riding – which is to say, she shepherded horse-crazy girls through a delicate period of their lives, till they arrived at the other end and trotted off into adulthood with rarely a thank-you for instruction meanwhile.

Having somewhere taken to heart Emerson’s Self-Reliance, I built a variegated work-history for myself, delivering cheap furniture, editing and printing books, painting apartments, copywriting, felling trees, designing and running an architectural cast-stone plant, driving trucks, teaching 10^th grade History, building stone walls, doing an internet start-up, and working my way from carpenter’s assistant to job superintendent at the very upper end of the Manhattan renovative market.

Generally speaking, I like working with my hands.  The immediate feedback of touch, ear, and eye combined with the knowledge of a well-designed tool’s characteristics – that’s good work.  I also like working for the very rich (though the excess of installing some panel that could pay the year’s bills for some Hopi town’s basketball program has occasionally pricked my conscience).  Lower-end millionaires tend to be fussy and nervous, but billionaires! – they can make the game worth the candle. They comprehend process and expertise better than the average bear, and they rarely let impatience trump the laws of physics.  If the best thing is to let a job sit a day or two before bringing the painters in, they’ll do it.

About a year and a half ago I was finishing the gut-renovation of a brand-new apartment for a fellow who teaches CEOs how to gain self-confidence. It was a nice project, if a little modern.  I must admit my heart was not much in it by the end. Fifteen years of dust and the constant turmoil of construction were beginning to take a toll. Also, the front office had been playing games for months, promising very wishful schedules while bottlenecking the cabinetry through a single overwhelmed shop.  As the man on point, I found the resulting acrimony to be as tedious as it was avoidable.

This conversation turned my thoughts.  I started that very day to wonder what I would do if I could do whatever I wanted.  A few weeks’ consideration prompted a further question, what is it I love? Sometimes even the obvious needs proper framing to appear.  In my case it was immediately clear that if I really had my druthers, I’d engineer.  But to account for my conclusion, I have to back up a bit.

My father led a nine-piece jazz band in the Canal Zone, where he grew up, called The Nails. He crooned and played violin. He more or less dropped both as the demands of adulthood grew more strident.  For me, the playing bug bit at puberty, and I took up guitar in the fall of ’69.  There were some seriously good pickers at my high school.  I learned quickly, and learned how to steal.  For Christmas of ’72, I was given a shiny new Telecaster. It is still my main axe, and I’m seriously good on it.  After all this time, I’d damned-well better be.

So I played guitar around the peripheries of my life, like a crow hopping about the outskirts of a picnic.  I was in maybe a dozen bands.  In 1995 I developed an interest in songwriting, and this necessarily led to small-scale recording.  Those were the days of the 4- and 8-track Tascam Portastudios – destructive editing, bounced tracks, Dolby A.  Attention had to be paid with those machines, bless ‘em, and soon the process of recording began to prove interesting in itself.  Recording is, after all, but carpentry in an electronic form.  You build something by clearly defined stages, and you are rewarded for proceeding methodically with the best tools and techniques available.

Knowledge is power, and an intuitive sense of what the materials can and cannot take at any given moment is vital.  Somewhat later come in luck, taste, talent.  So I learned some basic processing, working from what sounded good and anything I could glean from books or the interviews in Mix. Many key concepts, like bussing, remained beyond me.  Meanwhile I climbed a technologic ladder through the Yamaha minidisk 4-track (the first consumer digital multitrack), eventually arriving at the Roland 24-track machine.  I still use it at home by preference, though I edit with the latest version of Nuendo.

So – to start the coda – we come to discuss an apprentice-mentor program that combines further training with a necessary foot-in-the-door.  Both sides are important for me.  On the one hand, what I still don’t know about engineering would fill volumes. On the other, it is not so easy to get a foot in the door at my age.  It’s not like being twenty-two.

I figure I have about two decades of good work ahead of me (and thank God for an innate taste for ear-protection, all those years onsite). I’m eager to enter my next step.

March 8, 2008

Dear Phillip,

You asked for impressions of the interview.

The studio is a mid-size facility in the dense heart of midtown.  It is an offshoot of the Hammerstein Ballroom, the landmark concert venue where MTV holds its annual New Year’s Eve party (to which I’ve been a couple of times). 

On the day I went there was nothing scheduled, and that lobby was cold.  The building itself dates back to the turn of the century, when it was built by the celebrated lyricist’s father. It was sold to the Masonic Temple in the 1920s, and they incorporated symbols of the Craft into the architectural details. The smaller of the two venues – room for about 600 seats at a presentation dinner – doubles as a rehearsal space for, say, the Philharmonic, or as a scoring studio.  I have the habit of clapping whenever I get a chance to go into such a room, and I did so here.  The acoustics are very nice indeed.

The tracking studio is called the Log Cabin because the performance room is rather quaintly done out in rustic style, like a set from Hee-Haw.  The effect is relaxing and not at all unpleasant.  The control room is large and “modern.”  The equipment is all first rate, starting with a big old Neve analog board – automated, of course.  Lots of off-board toys: Vintec mic-pre’s and optical compressors, Drawmer gates, stuff from Empirical Labs I’ve never gotten my hands on.  Everything feeds into ProTools, and almost nobody prints to the 2” tape in the mechanical room (this is unfortunate as near the top of my wish list is to learn the care and feeding of multi-track tape).

A couple of assistants were setting-up for tracking the next day.  Obie made the introductions.  I might as well introduce her into the narrative, myself – a quick and personable woman in her forties who radiates a manager’s disciplined efficiency.  An apparent sense of humor.  She carried a ballpoint and jangly bunch of keys in one hand, a blackberry in the other.  In response to my questions, she said she started as the receptionist.  That she rose by dint of her own native intelligence to manage the studio was left tacit.

Also, she seemed to have made up her mind in advance.  Barring my turning up in a diaper or refusing to turn off my i-pod (which I don’t have in any case) we were going ahead with the mentorship.  Face to face, I’m reasonably presentable (though I do speak in full sentences like Al Gore).  As we stood there I could identify various pieces of equipment and ask an informed question or two about the studio. And of course, I’m genuinely enthusiastic about the trade.

At one point she reminded me that as a matter of course most engineers feel it takes twenty years to master the craft (a calculus that places me at the ripe age of 73).  I agree with this standard.  What I’m doing is a gamble.  At the same time I’ve seen that working from principle can confer real advantages, even with the now.  I have a friend who is a real genius at this, and I owe a lot to emulating her approach.

We passed upstairs to the mixing studio, which has a bigger board, more/better signal processing.  It is tucked away, above the stage of the upper ballroom.  After a few minutes’ further chat we were through.

How we proceed from here is a bit up in the air. The next stage has to do with schedules, books, wet feet.

________________________________________________

I’ll add a second part as a twofer.  I spent my first day onsite yesterday.  Some impressions.

The first is that – after years of being rousted from bed by the ridiculous hours of construction – recording appears to have some civilized elements indeed.  The call is for 11:00 AM.  The first three hours are reserved for set-up.  In the event, there was nothing to prepare – a session having been cancelled in the tracking studio.  So Eric, the assistant engineer, gave me a tour of set-up.  I took a copy of the pre-session checklist and did a dry-run, poked into every cabinet, memorized the locations of equipment and amenities, and then sat down to study the patch-bay and mixing consul.  Time well spent.

After lunch I went upstairs to Studio 7, where a mixdown was due to continue at 2:00.  A boxing ring was rigging out in the upstairs ballroom – seating for about 500, a bar and popcorn machine, media facilities, etc.  The mixing board was locked-out – retaining its settings from the previous session – with a big crisscross of tape in the international sign for don’t touch me. I chatted with assistant.  The engineer arrived about 2:15 – a friendly, casual, rock & roller in his mid-forties with oil paint on his flannel shirt. He took about 20 minutes to set up his personal stuff and then loaded the session. Mostly he was just changing his relation to his hearing and recalling where he’d let matters lie twelve hours before.

Reggae.  Very strong rhythm section with a nice piccolo snare, a rather Spanish acoustic guitar, pad, tons of backing vocals supporting a tenor with talent.  The foundation of the mix was in place, and work concentrated on backing vocals.  The mix was to the loud modern pop-ideal with heavy compression – and monitored loud at about 90 dB. Evidently the compression was built in several incremental stages addressing different parts of envelope. It certainly rocked.

(Another strong impression was that I will not smoke my occasional Camel on the seventh floor fire-escape balcony as some other hardy individuals do. Not a second time, thank you very much.)

The client arrived about 3:15, by which time it was all over for this song but the tweaking.  Graphically, the mix was a solid brick of sound, maybe half a decibel of headroom.  You could hear everything.  The assistant logged the off-board settings and the engineer printed the track: full mix, karaoke (no lead vocal), vocal up 3 dB, down 3 db, various sections of the components.  The guitarist showed up.  After about an hour it was time to start another song.  This is what I’d been waiting for.

The new piece was monster-Goth Reggae, a sort of Frankenstein meets Watching the Detectives.  It seemed rather muddy and flaccid after the previous track’s scintillating, in-your-face clarity.  A decision was made to reuse the same sonic set-up as before – too bad, from my point of view, as I would have benefited from the engineer’s building-up from raw signal by adjusting every box in the rack.  Still there was plenty to absorb.

Not that there were any surprises in the order of business.  Kick, snare, toms, overheads, bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, Reggae backbeat guitar, special guitar fills, and so forth.  You start at the basement and work your way up.  Gate, compress, EQ, delay, FX.  I sat like a fortunate kid who’s noticed the arrival of a bulldozer and backhoe on the lot next door.  As the elements gelled, the rhythm gained a syncopated drive.  The muddy power-chords resolved into something like moral imperatives.  It began to be music.

My own quiet moment of glory came as a result of being able to hear parts.  I scribbled a note “The backbeat rhythm guitar plays a major chord 8 bars after its first appearance.”  A boo-boo.  After about ten minutes the engineer stood up for a moment and turned my way; I slipped him the paper.  About five minutes later he played the section in question.  About five minutes after that he played it again. About another five he snipped a little from a later section and hey presto! corrected the damned thing. It took another two passes to jolt the guitarist into a cheery, “Hey, you corrected my mistake!”

Life in the fast lane.

I left at about 8:30 for a previous appointment with a fiddle player.  Downstairs, the fights were paused between bouts – the crowd milling by the bar, truculent and confused.  I heard somebody knocked somebody else out in the second round. I hope it wasn’t the main event.

Yours,

David