and I’m pretty sure I heard at least one hoo-whunker before the night was through (oh wait, sorry, that one was me)! I’m very happy with how the rhythm tracks came out from yesterday. We got some great sounding stuff and made a bit more headway through the basic tracking. We’re only 2 sessions into the album, and we’ve already managed to get down most of the drums, some acoustic and electric guitars, and a leather cushion off of a chair in my house. There are so many more things around that will make noise, so I don’t really know what we will end up with, but, as any other Tater will tell you, I love the whole process of recording! So many chances to try things that we can’t really do live, like having 2 Brads, or 3.5 Gregs, fr’instance, and the discovery of sounds and ideas is so much fun! It feels like painting does, in that we get to see the finished work revealed to us a little at a time. In performance, we never have that luxury; we might wish we had played something differently, or I might like something we just played, but basically by the time we discover that, it’s over. If we’re lucky we can try to repeat (or not!) the same thing next show, but it’s never the same.

In the end, it reinforces the idea that recording, at least in the studio, and performance are two very different things, with very different results. There are benefits and pitfalls to both, and I guess the trick is let each one be its own thing – use a live performance to do what you can’t in a studio setting, like interact with an audience, and feed off of the energy back & forth, and use the studio to capture ideas and possibilities that are either impossible or unlikely to come from a live concert. For myself,  I’m not really that interested in hearing an artist in concert duplicate their album note for note, solos & all, and hearing an album that is just a ’snapshot” of a live concert isn’t much better. Without being there, as part of the audience or on stage, the “live” aspect of it just feels lost on an album. There are exceptions to both, but in general I’m much more interested in letting each medium do what it does best.

So don’t expect to see the leather cushion at a show anytime soon, but I think you’ll like what it can do in the studio!

Tags: CD, live shows, recording, sounds

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