A Note About
The Recordings
These songs were recorded live, i.e., guitar and voice simultaneously, same take.
I overdubbed the harmony after, listening to the original live take on headphones. I recorded them in blocks of twenty or twenty-five, drumming out one after the other. They are filled with mistakes — notes, words, inverted verses, clunkers, you name it — but I’d decided at the outset that these videos were meant to be demonstrations, not album-cuts: pristine renderings were never the object.
In almost every instance, I rolled with first-take/best-take; and I can hear cracks in my middle-aged voice by the end of each marathon session. I changed shirts every so often just so you wouldn’t have to see me in the same clothes every video.
The good news: these raw videos show what I can actually reproduce in live performance, not an idealized studio creation. When you hire me, I’ll be able to deliver mistakes, slip-ups, and goofs similar to the ones featured here!
For those interested in the how-to, the recording tech couldn’t be simpler: I’m singing into an Audix i5, an off-the-rack hundred-buck dynamic mic commonly utilized to amplify a snare drum. The guitar is recorded mostly from the sound hole (contrary to common practice) with a single Shure shotgunny dynamic mic. It took my engineer about seven minutes to get the levels and dial it in.
As is so often the case in music, Less turns out to be More: without the distraction of fancy technical equipment and sonic effects, the song itself knocks on your door and sits down with you for a visit. Nothing gets hidden or left behind in a cloud of studio slickness. And recording without headphones pushes you to sing out the way you would during a regular stage performance. Taken as a whole, it’s a good sonic capture of what I do. And it was a ton of fun: the session-time went by in a snap of the fingers.
The Videos Themselves: Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
All the glitches you see — and there are a bunch of them — are completely my responsibility. Andrew my engineer/videographer/still-photographer would record me with one camera while I did my live take; and then set up other angles for visual variety while I played through the recorded song again over the monitors.
Well, I’ve never been able to play the same song the same way twice — so it won’t be hard to spot where I miss the ‘sync’ by coming in late or changing the fingering or mangling the lyrics. But you’re still hearing the original undoctored music. And I’m singing just as full on the extra camera-run or runs as I am on the primary.
ANDREW FALK
It’s my pleasure to boast about my collaborator on this web project, Andrew Falk.
I’m generally acknowledged to be America’s Biggest Tech Idiot — I don’t even know how to upload a photo or .gif to a Facebook post. So when I approached Andrew to take me on, our roles were quickly defined:
I would play guitar and sing.
Andrew would do absolutely everything else.
All my life, I’ve loved things that under-promised and over-delivered. Nothing beats a miracle shrouded in a plain brown wrapper. Andrew’s Starcore Recording Studio is perhaps the best example of that: it’s a metal pole-barn, one-half farm equipment, one-half soundroom/control-room, in the middle of a cornfield in rural Almont, Michigan.
Dirt road takes you there; no sign out front; no ‘artist’s lounge’; no green M&Ms; the rest-room is that row of corn over there; and the studio gets flat-out stifling when the sun beats on the tin roof and the noisy room air-conditioner is shut off during the recording process.
Most notable: there’s no clock in the studio. Andrew doesn’t time you. He only thinks in terms of the artistic endeavor: the sound, the song, the performance, and the straightest, simplest method to capture your best work.
As a recording engineer? Nobody can touch him. Great ears, and great instincts: the right mic, the right pre-amp, the right mix — and he gets there right away.
But wait, there’s more!
Andrew is:
an accomplished professional drummer
a professional still-photographer
a highly creative videographer
He can handle every aspect of your music project.
So, my message to Detroit-area or lower-Michigan-area musicians: If you’re looking to record your band and make a proper commercial video to distribute, look no further: Starcore is your one-stop shop.
If you like what you’ve seen and heard in my simple videos, imagine what he can do with yours.
He’s also an extremely nice, modest, interesting person. He truly cares about your vision. Your project becomes his project. My bet is he’ll become your very good friend, as he’s become mine.
Sometimes you run into the right person at the right time in your life. I sure did. Andrew, I couldn’t have done this project without you. Forever grateful.