The Light of Day

So you want to make an album? (part 4)
KeithHandy posted in Composing, Old skool, Producing, So You Want... on March 25th, 2007

Installment 4: These installments are not sticking to the subject in their titles anyway, so this one is just called “Installment 4″ for now.

Graduation had been a hollow experience. There was no feeling of achievement, merely an acknowledgment that we had put in our thirteen (twelve in my case) years and were free to leave. While I understand America’s motivation for mandating this, I think the way we go about it needs to be reformed. The “anguished teen” cliche is unnecessary, and would be more of an exception than a rule if we had more respect for the individual, encouraged every child to pursue learning at his/her own pace, and permitted work experience and apprenticeship for younger children. After the first few years of teaching the basics, enforced homogenized schooling becomes a cage, and we learn to live our adult lives as a continuation of that cage.

So it was naturally in the aftermath of all this that the theme for my rock opera, with the working title Factory, began to take form. I think the title’s earliest incarnation was The People Factory, since what we are ultimately mass-producing is ourselves. Eventually it became Through Forbidden Black Doors — seemingly an improvement, because it focused more on the escape than the entrapment, but a couple of things still bug me about it: Firstly, “black” doesn’t mean anything; it comes from a lyric that needed an extra syllable to fit the music. And secondly, people tend to forget exactly what the title is, and make up their own bastardizations when they bring it up in conversation.

Not that bringing it up in conversation was a smooth ride from my end either; The rift between my ever-evolving “rock concept” and where other musicians’ heads were at was not getting any narrower. “Rock”, in my mind, was a living, breathing, storytelling, audio-visual “force” or “spirit” that brought bright colors and vivid images to mind. In turn, “rock opera” was clearly something that, although a few existed, had not begun to crack open its glaringly obvious potential. From the other musicians’ perspective, though, music was still a thing where you played an instrument, joined a band, entertained people, and called it a day. They were polite and open to listening to my ideas, but they generally weren’t fired up about weaving songs into a narrative. So it was that this would be Keith’s project, not a band project.

Bands were still the musical currency, though, and I kicked myself the first time I neglected to respond to a certain handwritten “keyboardist wanted” ad on the SUNY Fredonia bulletin boards. It was for a cover band, and it rattled off several reasonably up-my-alley bands followed by this unforgettable gem: “basically, anything that’s good — in other words, NO TOP 40!!!” When the same ad went up a second time, I kept my personal promise to leap at it. I proudly remember being outspoken and insistent that we should ditch the covers and do all original material. So for the next few years, I was in an all-original progressive rock band called “Episodes”, and at least half of what we were playing were Keith Handy originals. We only ever played about six or seven gigs in our entire life span, but this seemed like the logical time to get serious about that elusive first album. And for once, I wasn’t the only one talking about it.

I’m not sure why I didn’t pitch my rock opera, or even a song or two from it, to Episodes. Maybe it was because I had so many other songs and didn’t want to monopolize the writing. In any case, when not rehearsing with them, I regularly trotted off to the piano practice rooms at Mason Hall to be the “mad genius at work”, losing myself in the moment to hammer out chord progressions and segues. Mason Hall also had a full-fledged 24 track recording studio for its recording program. I was not in that program, but everybody knew somebody who was, so it was easy to get free recording time. The downside was that the engineers were students with very little experience.

“How hard can it be to set up some microphones and run a tape machine?” For some reason I expected the transition from high school senior to college freshman to suddenly surround me with talented and forward-thinking people, but the only thing I truly saw college culture excel at was helping the beer industry to thrive. The locally-produced cassettes I bought at a nearby record store seemed boring and disappointing — and production-wise, they just “didn’t sound right” — as was the case with many of the shows I attended.

Episodes did record a few songs at Mason Hall, but then we all kind of unanimously decided they were “unofficial”, because they had some flaws. If we were going to make an album, it damn well had to be perfect. We later booked time at a small studio outside of Rochester to record a full album’s worth of material. In some ways, though, the Mason Hall recordings were actually better.

One sad thing about those gigantic reels of 2″ tape used in 24-track studios: they were expensive. So expensive that people usually re-used them, or gave them to the studio in lieu of unpaid session bills. So nobody, not me, not any of my friends, can ever go back and remix something we recorded in a 24-track studio, because all the original tracks are gone. If we did have those tapes, it would be nothing to transfer them into a computer, fix the minor glitches, and actually mix them in a clear, full, and satisfying way. But as it stands, we usually have to settle for umpteenth-generation cassette copies of mixes done under the double whammy of limited time and aural fatigue — which, when you think about it, defeats the whole point of using a studio in the first place. Conversely, if I recorded something at home and preserved the tapes, I can restore it, remix it, and bring it into the 21st century where it belongs.

Next (maybe): what you think a pro studio will do for you, and what it actually does to you… initially, anyway.