02024-09-03 | Uncategorized
Today I posted the new album to Backstage. 14 tracks. 40 minutes of music. Exactly four weeks from start to finish, because I arrived at the refuge on Tuesday 6. August. I loved every moment of working on this album. One guitar in the wilderness… and my reaction to the surroundings and the sound of the cave and six hours of daily zazen. I want to make more recordings like this, especially now that I know the equipment does what I was hoping it could do. one guitar three… next year sometime, somewhere.
A big thank you has to go to Roshi Joan Halifax, who has been an important part of my life for two decades and who invited me to stay at the refuge. It was she who suggested the cave as a place to record my guitar. Many thanks also to Sensei Noah Kodo Roen, who built the meditation cave.
02024-08-28 | Uncategorized
It’s been a week of putting my hand into a dark basket and pulling out things I didn’t even remember making. The dark basket was a folder that contained about 50 audio files I recorded in the Wilderness, time-stamped but otherwise untitled. I enjoyed that discovery process a lot. By yesterday afternoon the album had grown to 14 pieces and an overall length of 40 minutes… and there are a few more things to investigate. Discovered a piece I recorded while it rained. I can hear rain drops hitting the window, before I started playing. I left a few seconds of that, of course. While many pieces are quiet, there is also one rumba and one bossa, which is great because it creates a little contrast. Some of the quiet pieces have notes that just hang there in the stillness like water dripping from a pine cone in slomo. Or golden honey from a spoon. Just lovely.
Such an interesting way to make a recording: find a lovely location and spend a week recording anything that comes to mind, reacting to the space and its surroundings. I think I might want to make this part of a series of albums. I could rent a place somewhere and then proceed to discover how I respond to that particular place. I don’t think I have ever gone to a studio with every piece of music worked out. A few sketches, some chord changes… and the rest happens in situ. For some guitarists it’s all about the performance and how to record and execute it perfectly. One has the impression the result would be the same regardless of the recording location. For me it’s about the way I react to the room and what’s going on and my recordings are always tied to a time and a location. Pick another time or another location and the recording will be different. That’s what I hear in this music, the location, the surroundings, the stillness.
A technical note: I love the ability of the MixPre 6II to record 32bit floating point at 96kHz. I didn’t have to pay much attention to the recording levels. Many pieces would have ended up in the red – if they had been recorded 24bit. With 32bit floating point I was able to import a file to my laptop (last week), discover that it was hitting peaks of +4db… and simply normalize down to a max of -0.2db. Don’t ask me how that works, because I still don’t know, but that’s the magic of 32bit floating point. Since the MixPre 6II was designed for audio recording for movies, this was very important… if an actor starts yelling, no problem… just take down the gain afterwards. It’ll be fine. The MixPre 6II is amazing and I can’t imagine working without it.
