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More of My Roller coaster LifeBy Bruce Kimmel

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Bruce Kimmel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-6058-9

Chapter One

I'd gotten up at seven and was at the studio by eight. Geoff Daking was at the big board in the control room, turning knobs, plugging in cords, pushing buttons, while his young assistant, Ken Feldman, was in the studio itself, placing microphones. I said hello, met Ken, and felt right at home.

As I watched Geoff go about his business, I realized I knew absolutely nothing about what he was doing. Oh, I knew the basics, but I didn't know what wires were going where to do what, I didn't know what the buttons and knobs on the console did. At least I knew what the faders did, so that was a plus.

I listened to him talking to Ken and telling him which mics to use on which instrument, which vocal mic to use for Liz, and tried to understand the technical jargon but couldn't make any sense out of "bus this to that" and "cross-patch this into that."

A little while later, our drummer, Ron Tierno, who was the drummer on Cats, arrived and got set up. Then Alex and our bass player, Mark Minkler, arrived, and they set up, too. Liz got there around eight-thirty. Larry sauntered in a couple of minutes later. Alex handed out the charts, and we decided on an order for the the songs.

Liz would spend most of the day in a small vocal booth so that there would be complete separation between her and the musicians. That way when we did her final vocals she'd be singing to totally clean orchestra tracks.

About nine-fifteen we began with a rehearsal of the first song. During the other little sessions I'd produced, mostly I'd meekly sit there and maybe offer a suggestion or two. But right from the get-go I was all over everything. After they'd rehearsed the track, I was in there asking Alex to incorporate a figure he was playing in his piano part a couple more times in the song. He agreed, and Liz liked that idea very much.

I asked Geoff if he could make the piano sound a little more spacious, and he made some adjustments and got it just the way I wanted to hear it. I was very impressed with the reverb he was using. The sound, of course, would go to tape completely flat and dry, and we'd add reverb in the mix as we saw fit. But for monitoring purposes I could not listen to it dry, I needed a nice ambience and what Geoff had chosen was just perfect.

"What is that reverb? It sounds amazing," I said.

Geoff pointed to a machine by the console. It looked like a space-age vacuum cleaner to me. "That's an old EMT," he replied. "They don't use them anymore, but I'm fond of them."

"Well, it's great." I looked at everyone in the booth and said, "Let's do a take."

And so we began. After the first take, the musicians, all of them, without being asked, came into the booth and wanted to hear a playback. We played it back, talked about it, and did another take. They came back in the booth and listened again. I wasn't thrilled having to do this routine, but said nothing and it continued throughout the day after each and every take.

The problem with it, of course, was that we were trying to do fourteen songs in one day. The intention had been to start at nine and try to wrap in the early evening. By the fourth song that was clearly not going to happen, but once you go down a road like that you just can't put on the brakes and change what you're doing without getting everyone upset.

One thing we changed right away before going on to the second take was to swap out the mic that Geoff had chosen for Liz. He'd asked what I thought about it and I said that I thought it sounded thin and wasn't making her voice as warm as it usually was. He agreed and made the change to an old tube mic and that did the trick.

Liz's scratch vocals, meant to just make sure the tempos were right and that she and the band were together, were so good so much of the time I knew we'd be able to use parts or even full takes of the scratch vocals. Part of the reason for that is that on a first or second take you're getting everything really fresh. Occasionally I'd go in the booth and ask her to color certain words and phrases differently, just so each part of the lyric had its own specificity and didn't sound like the rest.

She was great about taking little notes like that, thinking about them, and then coming up with a color that was new and wonderful, or a new phrasing, or a new intention on a lyric line. I just wanted everything to be honest and real. That's all it was about, right from the first song—honesty and making a lyric real, whether that lyric was heartfelt or sly or funny.

When we were doing the first little rehearsal of the first song, I'd watched Liz in the booth. She was in there, emoting, and I realized instantly that if I watched her sing I might be fooled into thinking a performance was great when it was the watching rather than the hearing that I might be responding to. So, from that moment on, I never again watched another singer while they were recording. I sat at the console, closed my eyes, and made sure the performance was working for my ears and not my eyes.

At some point, the great bass player Jay Leonhart showed up. I can't quite remember whose idea it had been to do "If I Were A Bell," a perky up-tempo and delightful song from Guys and Dolls, slower and jazzy and sexy, but it was a great one. The song had never been done like that and Alex had done a killer arrangement and the bass part was a major part of that arrangement.

Jay was the king of the New York bass players and he was happy to come in and do that one track. I knew that on this track we'd be using the scratch vocal as a final vocal because they'd be playing off each other, almost like a duet.

So, after a rehearsal of it, I gave Liz a lot of little notes. Just subtle things, like to really lay back on the beginning (just her and the bass) and to take a little pause before certain words, to be sly and playful with other words, and to maybe do something vocally that would sell the word "swinging" on the lyric "If I were a gate I'd be swinging."

She took each and every note and came up with great stuff. We did three takes and the third was the keeper; it was incredible and absolute perfection.

Sitting in the control room, listening to Liz sing one great Frank Loesser song after another, was one of the most pleasurable things I'd ever done. And many of her scratch vocals were so perfect I knew that her real vocal session would be a piece of cake, as we'd only be plugging in certain lines in certain songs.

By nine at night, I began to get a little ornery about the playbacks for the band, but I kept my mouth shut and just did it. The session didn't end until two in the morning. We all straggled out of there tired and spent, but we all knew that the stuff we'd gotten was great.

I also knew that I would never do that again, never do that playback thing after every take. It sucked up too much time, and from now on the musicians and musical directors were just going to have to trust me and my ears and that I'd know when we had the right take.

The next day was the horn date. I think our musicians had all come from either Larry or Alex. Most of them were veteran Broadway pit musicians and several were playing shows that were currently running. They were all doing the session "under the table," as there was no way we could afford to pay them AFM rates, which included pension and welfare and all sorts of other stuff. The AFM did have a low-budget pressing agreement, but it was an...