June 2008 Archives

I was listening to a live recording of a Ryan Adams show the other day, and the song "Love is Hell" played. I am not sure of the nature of the recording process, but the song was elegantly mixed in stereo and we a really great recording of this song. I was listening for the effects that I knew were used on the album, but didn't hear them. What I heard was literallly two guitars, plugged into clean amps, and no effects. The result was very interesting. The music, the volume, and the atmosphere was not elevated in any way. The playing was right and in time, and sounded better than the studio version in my opinion.

The point of this is, sometimes its best not to hide behind pillars of insecurity: distorted guitars, louder drums, sloppy playing meant to sound like something its not.

Sometimes its best to just plug the guitar in the clean channel and play.

I went home recently and found a box of cassette tapes I used to do multitrack recordings when I was 20. There are some gems and a lot of crap, but its a nice trip into the past when all I had to record music was a dual tape deck and a Zoom drum machine.

This is the reason I haven't been posting here lately. I decided to take on the job of making recordings of all 47 tapes and posting them here.

I will be back soon as I have a lot to share. In the meantime check out Phil Golyshko. He is a friend of mine and hes been writing some stellar music lately. You can find him on myspace here.