reuben schmeuben gimmick
just pulled some old tapes from storage, and will be putting MP3s here now and then. to start things off, this is me playing the old theme from late night with david letterman (watched it like a fiend in the 80s), with david cornwell doing the voiceover. the name of my studio was reuben schmeuben, and this was intended to be the leadoff piece for a demo reel to send to prospective clients. ended up not doing much with it, because i had enough clients without mailing shit out or whatever. don't remember exactly, but i guess it was recorded in '87 or '88. memory lane. blast it, bitch!reuben schmeuben gimmick (.mp3, 1.6MB)
backstory
back then i didn't have a drum set, but was always dying to play drums. had this band camped out at the studio, led by a husband and wife. they were making backing tapes so the husband and wife could play gigs as a duo. the dude knew i loved playing the drums, so when they left one night he told me to help myself if i felt like it. well fuck! — a pretty nice set all miked up and ready, so i decided to record the letterman theme just for fun.
basically recorded it in two cycles, which is common enough when you're doing all the parts yourself. you rough in tracks for body, then replace them once you have something to play against. didn't have that luxury with the drums though, which were first, and stayed once they were laid down. just sat out there all lonely like and sang the song in my head while playing. took a bunch of takes, since i'm rarely in top form on drums. (rusty. then the blisters come.)
the guitar was a no-name les paul copy that i rebuilt from scratch. some fucker stole it in the late 90s. instead of tone controls, which i rarely use on a les paul, it had dual/series switches and, if i recall correctly, a polarity switch for one of the pickups. it was my go-to guitar when trying to mimic brian may — something i'll have a bit of in later clips. amp was a piece of shit. oh to have a do-over on those days.
bass was a no-name fender jazz copy that i still have. replaced the stock shit pickups with dimarzios.
keyboard was all roland D-50, which for the money and era had damned good hammond patches.
as with most things i recorded (not much considering i lived in a studio), i'd love to go back and play some screwed parts right. i'd just learned the song, and after a few years the keyboard parts sunk in a lot better — not so stiff. don't know why i'm so slow picking up some things properly. makes me depressed as hell when i listen to stuff like old yes albums and realize they weren't much older than i was here.
for the cheesy applause, i think the voiceover guy and i kept layering a sample buffer of us clapping on my yamaha SPX-90, then repeated it for the other side. funny how believable it sounds until it's isolated, then the looping shouts at ya.
far as the recording goes, the drums are in mono, which was a rare thing even at my small studio. since the clients i mentioned were only going to run their mixed tapes through their mono PA system, i mixed their drums to a single track of my 8-track to save space for other things. normally, i put drums as a premixed stereo pair on tracks 3 and 4. why not 1 and 2? oh, just one detail of about 5 million that recording geeks will swear to as a matter of hedging bets. (on a stereo pair, putting one side on an analog tape edge track is asking for imbalance, especially in the high end.)
Labels: music
posted by saltypig @ 12:00
Except for roughly 0:56 to 1:05, your guitar playing reminded me more of Mike Stern than Brian May. (I'm a fan of both of them, by the way.)
Here's a link to Mr. Stern's latest (leaving off much of the URL this time--thanks for the tip):
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Let-Cats-Mike-Stern/dp/B000GI3SWS
In an unrelated vein, but while I'm here, I should also mention that although I know some confused reviewer(s?) at Amazon classified Wally Badarou's "Words of a Mountain" CD as New Age, I wouldn't put it in that category. On the other hand, I never really tried to categorize it and I'm not sure exactly what label I would slap on it. But I share your general aversion to the insipid stuff that is the usual fare of "New Age," so when I hear something like that album, I know that such a label doesn't do it justice.
yeah, 0:56 to 1:05 was something i debated redoing, but liked the way it sounded, despite being obviously way fucked up, sloppy, underbent, yadda. would have embarrassed jimmy page, that shit. (big page fan here, but he was a sloppy boy.)
mike stern, huh? always had respect for that guy, though i haven't heard much from him. here's my familial "brush with mike stern" story if you're half bored.
on brian may, i was just saying the guitar was built with his sound in mind. there aren't many recordings left of my may imitation days, but i'll post stuff within the next few weeks that will have obvious may tones, though rarely did i get the playing and the electronics to meet. was a big multi-tracked distorted harmony guy for a while, but my tone in those days rarely rose to the challenge.
stern looks good on the album cover. wasn't he kinda pudgified back in the 80s?
i dig well enough the clips i heard , but i remember stern as more of an outside player, which he excelled at. would like to hear him do more of that, with less of the digitized guitar stuff. what do you think's going on there? there was a cool aspect to it on "Good Question" at first, but... i dunno. i started to get pat metheny vibes.
how do you feel about the strong conventional, digital, somewhat "smooth-jazzy" flavor to some of the album, despite obvious bop/straight roots here and there? shouldn't mikey boy be stepping out? maybe he should do a letterman theme cover. yeah! very forward looking, those letterman theme cover guys.
the weird thing with "new age" is that there are so many good people doing music that sometimes goes near that territory. but if that's all somebody does, bring out the bucket for my throwup. shit, i "wrote" and recorded for a friend's project about 35 minutes of bilge you could call new age. some of it wasn't 100% pukey, but i damn sure knew when i'd crossed the line into insipid dreck, and never listen to it. most of it was improvised, then accompanied on following tracks. throw up a couple of keyboard patches that play themselves, and you're halfway there.
so many non-musicians are fooled into thinking something's noteworthy, making an audience for mediocre fluff. was at an indian restaurant a few months ago and there was this plinky-plink american piano shit playing for like 5 minutes, the instrumental version of what i call "shower singing" — where you just make up whatever and send it out with a pretentious air. i can sit down at a piano (or used to be able to anyway) and generate absolute trash that would make the average "new age" fan cream herself. that's the kinda stuff i abhor.
of course, music is a damned funny thing, how you can hear something once and not like it, but if in somebody's car and you hear it multiple times, it can grow on you. became a big fan of the cult and haysi fantayzee from my scuba dive buddies playing them on road trips to quarries in the 80s.
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