Mazz and Chuck's Excellent Adventure

[Casey H]

Chuck and Mazz
Can't wait to hear the final products!

Your adventure is very motivational to many of us and certainly demonstrates the power of relationships built with the Taxi forum and Taxi Road Rally.

Best of luck! No matter what happens with these tracks, Taxi gets a huge "assist".

Now rest up a few days and do post-production with fresh ears!!

Warmest,
Casey

[davewalton]

We will receive our rough mixes in the next couple of weeks. There will be enough of a time gap that I think we will listen with fresh ears.

I'm physically and mentally drained and off to bed.

Chuck

Ha! That sounds awesome

[matto]

Excellent adventure indeed, looking forward to hearing the final product!

M

[mazz]

This was truly an amazing adventure! I was able to take a little downtime yesterday afternoon and absorb what we had accomplished over the course of 3 intensely focused days.

We had 1 day of preproduction. We basically went over the lead sheets we had written and finalized arrangement ideas and added intros and endings where necessary. We knew that things would be a bit fluid in the studio and we left room for that. One of the reasons we hired such top notch pros for our drums and bass was that they would also be able to add some suggestions from their experience. We were not disappointed!

First day in the studio was, of course, partly dedicated to setup, which went very smoothly. Dan, the bass player/engineer, had already communicated to the studio which mics he wanted to use so they already had those plugged in and ready to go. The studio is a top notch facility with a very nice lounge/kitchen, outside patio with tables and benches (very park like), assistant engineers and interns. The interns took our lunch orders and ran for the lunch and basically were available to assist in any way necessary. The studio has a machine room that has pretty serious air conditioning. All the computers, hard drives and audio interfaces are in that room along with 2 Studer 24 track machines with Dolby SR!! I doubt they get a ton of use, but the investment in gear overall is pretty serious (did I mention the big control room has an SSL board?!!!).

There were approximately 12 mics on the drums, some close and some further away. I saw a couple of Neumanns for overheads, some small Neumanns on snare and hat, a couple of AKG 414s on the toms (2 toms were used, a small jazz kit), a Neumann on kick and a couple of AKGs spread wide about 10 or 12 feet on either side of the drum kit. We got a great drum sound!

The piano was mic'd with a couple of B&K small diaphragm condensers. According to Dan, they are the high voltage models and were going through Millennia preamps (yum!). We discussed the stereo image of the piano and both agreed that we are not enamored of an extremely wide stereo image on pianos, so the mics were placed about 2 feet above the strings, one pointing towards the bass strings and one toward the high end, but there would be enough bleed into the mics from either end to make a nice stereo image but not one with a huge hole in the middle.

The guitar amp was a Fender deluxe tube amp mic'd with a Royer ribbon mic. Chuck's guitar sounds really nice acoustically and it was also mic'd with a small diaphragm Neumann, probably an KM147. The guitar was also going direct so there were 3 tracks for guitar.

The bass also had a Neumann on it and was going direct through an Avalon tube DI. I believe we were mostly using the preamps from the studio's API board, the newest model of API, which is really nice sounding!

We got off to a good start slightly ahead of the schedule. I had a metronome app on my iphone (Tempo) and we started with the tempos that Chuck and I had worked out ahead of time and decided if things should be faster or slower depending on how it was feeling in that moment. We didn't play to a click, however, this is jazz after all! Since the tunes we wrote were based on standard chord progressions, most of which the guys had played before, we set ourselves up for efficiency and we achieved it! We cut 11 tunes the first day, often with 3 or 4 takes per tune. This was including lunch. We sent the drummer home a couple of hours early and spent the time listening to the day's work and taking notes (as per Chuck's post, cryptic notes! ) and decided that 2 of the tunes would need re-cutting. This left us with 3 tunes to cut from scratch and 2 to re-do the following day.

The second day started with Mike the video guy arriving and setting up. We cut a new tune and did about 5 takes so that we could get some good footage. All in all we cut the 5 tunes we intended to and listened to the new ones to see if any fixes were needed. The rhythm tracks were good so we decided to try some Christmas tunes. We decided to try to get 2 in the can and we succeeded. The drummer was sent home around 3:30 (we started at 10AM) and we started to do our fixes and overdubs.

Since we had listened to the tracks, we became aware that we (Chuck and I) needed to leave more space in our solos for the rhythm section to groove through, and since this is intended for production music, space is always a good thing to leave since it's going to be behind dialog mostly anyway. So we re-cut several solos and fixed up some rhythms, tightened up some unison lines, etc. We thought we were going to have rough mixes at the end, but we decided to use our time to do the fixes and have the engineer do the rough mixes back at his studio and send them to us. That was a good choice. We got out right around our stop time after spending 10 hours per day in the studio.

We both commented on how much energy and focus was packed into those 3 days, so much, in fact, that Tuesday night when Chuck arrived seemed more than just 4 days ago! We also got in lunch with a couple of Taxi buddies on Wednesday, cooked dinner at my house Wednesday night, went out to dinner on Thursday and met up with more Taxi friends on Friday night for a "wrap" party! Whew!!

All of this wouldn't have been possible without this forum and the Road Rally. Chuck and I met here and continued our relationship at the Rally 3 or 4 years ago, and have even stayed at each others' houses and spent time with the two families together. We developed a mutual respect and trust, enough such that one of us would fly across the country to play with players he'd never met and invest some good money into a project. There's an element of risk in anything we do in life, and for both of us to be willing to take a risk together like this is pretty cool, IMO. Thanks to Taxi for providing the fertile ground for collaborations like this to spring forth!!

OK, I hope this thread was informative and at least a little entertaining! I'd be happy to try to answer any questions of a technical and/or musical nature as it relates to our project. Hopefully we will get some music up and possibly some pictures and video eventually too. I'll keep updating the thread as things progress.

Thanks for following along!

Cheers!!

Mazz

[stevebarden]

Ahhhh...I should check into the forum more often. I'm just hearing about this. Had I known in time I would have volunteered to work Chuck's wah-wah pedal for him!

[keithl]

Sounds like a real good time. I am a "little" offended that I was not asked to play cowbell
Good jazz ALWAYS has room for cowbell

Looking forward to hearing more about the sessions

[fusilierb]

Ahhhh...I should check into the forum more often. I'm just hearing about this. Had I known in time I would have volunteered to work Chuck's wah-wah pedal for him!

You look very pale these days Steve. Are you ok?

[mazz]

A few iPhone photos from our session:

My desk for two days:



Chuck tuning his 7 string guitar:



Behind the desk:



Almost done listening, almost time to have a glass of vino!!





Thanks for letting us share our adventure!!

Mazz

[kclements]

Thanks for the posts, guys.

So anxious to hear what you guys were working on.

cheers
kc

[crs7string]

It's hard to believe that I was in San Francisco a week ago. Unfortunately, I have been battling a bug all week. Between little sleep, going from early morning to the wee hours, and the recycled air on the plane I created the perfect storm to pick up the crud.

We took delivery of our rough mixes today. Overall, the tracks sound great. The are a few places we will fix notes or rhythms. There may be phrases we eliminate completely to create even more space.

The decisions we made on the music, our players and the studio are shining through the tracks.

The joy of four musicians interacting live is coming through the music. There is much nuance that would be nearly impossible to "program" into a midi generated drum and bass tracks. With twelve microphones on the drums there is an incredible amount of clarity. Dan's bass is warm and fat. The piano speaks with a clear voice. (After George Benson re-records all my guitar parts, the guitar will hold it's own )

We will be sharing some music soon.

Chuck