It’s difficult to convey with words the excitement of listening to your new record 37 times in a row and deciding whether the break between the first and second tracks should be an eighth of a second longer. This picture will have to suffice.

We finished mastering the new CD tonight. Billy, Paul, and I worked with Mike Hagler to sequence the album and burn the master. The masters sound natural, not the headache-inducing square-wave distorted stuff that’s the norm nowadays. Must sleep now.

I stumbled across this last night while preparing to attend tonight’s mastering session for our 3rd CD, Most Folk Heroes Started as Criminals. We like Bob Weston a lot. He engineered our first CD, and has recently opened a mastering studio in Chicago. Bob’s engineering style eschews the slick and synthetic in favor of naturalistic sounds. The same sensibility informs his mastering work:

…[A]nother reason we wanted to open the place was to be part of the solution to the insane loudness war thing. We want to educate our clients and try to get CDs sounding good again. There are so many now that just sound loud, but not good. I think a lot of younger guys and girls in bands think that mastering simply means making it really loud.

Read the full article at bouncetodisk.com

…Most Folk Heroes Started Out as Criminals

We’re mastering it tomorrow (Thursday) night with Mike Hagler at King Size in Chicago. Unless something changes over the next 24 hours, here’s the track list and sequence:

Side 1:

1. Sandy River Belle
2. California
3. Short Life of Trouble
4. The Logjam
5. Mississippi Trashboat
6. Pick Poor Robin
7. British Army

Side 2:

1. Lay Down My Old Guitar
2. Takeup Reel / Cold Frosty / *Grey Eagle
3. Little Sadie
4. Pain in My Heart
5. Trishenku’s Heaven
6. Dead Flowers
7. Listen to the Mockingbird

*As a recovering Ohioan, I should point out that the correct spelling is ‘gray’.

We’re in the home stretch for our as-yet-untitled 3rd CD. Here’s the probable track list:

• California
• Short Life of Trouble
• The Logjam
• Sandy River Belle
• Pain in My Heart
• Trishanku’s Heaven
• The Takeup Reel/ Cold Frosty Morning/ Grey Eagle
• Pick Poor Robin Clean
• Listen to the Mockingbird
• Little Sadie
• Dead Flowers
• Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar
• Join the British Army
• Mississippi Trashboat

Alexander Gelfand, who penned the introduction to our nearly-out-of-print first CD, is on board to write the liner notes.

Some entirely unuseful stats:

• Number of tracks: 14
• Running time: 42 minutes
• Number of vocal numbers: 10
• Number of instrumental numbers: 4
• Number of times the word number appeared in the previous two lines: 4
• Number of original compositions: 5
• Number of traditional or cover tunes: 9
• Number of songs featuring the accordion: 2
• Number of tunes featuring the erhu: 1
• Number of jaw harps or didgeridoos brought to the studio in hopes of sneaking them into a song when no one was paying attention: 2
• Number of songs featuring the jaw harp and/or didgeridoo: 0*
• Number of tunes in f# minor: 2 (Logjam and Trishanku)
• Number of tunes with bird references in the title: 3
• Number of tunes that have a thing that the band refers to as “the thing”: 2 (Dead Flowers and Short Life of Trouble)

* this injustice must be made right by overdubbing jaw harp and/ or didgeridoo solos on every tune, no matter how inappropriate.

We had a hugely productive day yesterday at King Size, pushing our as-yet-untitled third CD closer to the finish line. We were also honored to have the great photographer Paul Natkin join us for a quick photo shoot.

More later.

This just popped up on YouTube yesterday–a video of an anonymous drummer playing along to our first CD while driving the streets of Chicago. If the author would like to play some steering wheel with us sometime, he should drop us a line.

The tune is ‘Cindy’, from our Just a Spoonful CD. For what it’s worth, it’s the only Frankentake on the first CD (at least that I can remember). For the uninitiated, a Frankentake is a composite of multiple performances, edited together. They can be minor edits (like this one), or major surgery (like Lars Ulrich’s drum tracks, which may come from literally dozens of different takes).

Cindy is a good, old-fashioned Frankentake. Bob Weston pulled out the razor blade, cut the tape, and spliced in a chunk from another, more in-tune performance. The drop out part (’peaches in the summertime…’) comes from an alternate take.

Here’s a fun little artifact from the Where You Been So Long sessions: a version of the Leaving of Liverpool (MP3) without vocals.

When we record our tunes, we usually do the instrumental tracks as a group, and then overdub vocals. We had done this song a few times at Irish gigs and in our usual loud bar environments, and I had gotten in the habit of belting out the lead vocal Clancy Brothers style. It worked fine then, but when it came time to record the vocal in the studio, though, I became acutely aware of just how horrible I sounded.

We did it in ‘A’ because that’s the key it was in on the Dubliners record I learned it from¹. But it’s below my range. And there were other problems beyond that. The big ‘F’ sound on the first word of the song (’Farewell’) was causing me to lose all my breath pressure. By the time I got to the second big ‘F’ (on ‘far away’), I was sounding like a bagpipe that had been run over by a semi truck.

I did about a dozen takes that day, each significantly worse than the one before, and then gave up. We contemplated redoing it in a different key, or having someone else do the lead. In the end, though, we had Mike do this Karaoke mix of the tune for me to practice to. You can still hear a faint remnant of my original guide vocal, but, otherwise, it’s just the instrumental backing tracks and some of the solos.

In our next session, I tried a completely different approach, doing the verses as quietly as I could muster. We did the choruses en masse, with Ryan, Billy, and me around a single mic, and then double-tracked it. The two tracks were panned hard to either side, giving a pleasant big vocal sound. We also lopped out part of the first solo section, as the song had gotten too long.

The result seems to have been acceptable. I will always be immensely proud of the fact that it was played on RTE. Anyway, grab a bottle of Jameson’s and sing along.

The Leaving of Liverpool (Karaoke mix) MP3

¹ Egads, that’s a lot of prepositions in one sentence… four counting the one that ends it. I am appalled.