Tag Archives: studio

Album

Words from Dic(tionary)

dictionary with letter A

 

Album: (n) 1. a blank book for the insertion of photographs, stamps or pictures 2. a collection of recordings on a long-playing record, cassette or compact disc, which then is issued as a single item.

God, I wanted to make an album.

I was twenty years old and obsessed with the idea.

There was something about the final front cover, backliner notes and the whole idea of being in a recording studio that just rang my bells and clanged my cymbals.

There were a few problems:

  • First and foremost, I suppose, was that I was broke.
  • Second was the absence presently of the major talent to warrant such a maneuver.
  • Third and most pronounced was that I didn’t have a group.

Being extremely immature, I opted to address the third problem while ignoring the other two.

I started a band with members who were just as possessed as I was with the notion of “going vinyl.” We rehearsed for twenty minutes and for forty minutes talked about how much fun it was going to be to be famous. We finally put together the magic number of ten songs, and begged and pleaded with relatives for donations for our project.

We finally pieced together enough money to pay for the first ten hours in a studio, with no idea how we would pay for the rest.

It seemed like a good plan–mainly because we were crazy.

There was a studio in our town that not only recorded records, but had a plant which pressed the final product right on site. We acquired a very reasonable photographer (free) who shot our cover and back cover, and we spent all of our time writing the liner notes instead of rehearsing for the session.

So when we got in the studio and they played back what we sounded like, we were convinced that the tape they had used was warped–causing our voices to go flat.

We got better. Of course, it cost studio time. So at the end of the session, we had a pretty decent record, but owed $723 to get our magical mission released into our greedy paws.

Now, $723 to us was either going to be achieved by killing off all of our parents and inheriting the money, or breaking into the recording studio and stealing our record. After about two weeks of nasty phone calls from the studio, they finally negotiated a deal so that we could pay off our album in installments.

We finally had it in our hands. It was magical. It was the Holy Grail.

It didn’t sell.

So not only did we never pay back the studio, but we eventually had to give away all of our albums to people who kept insisting they already had one.

My fortunes in the recording industry have improved over the years, but I will never forget stalking my first album. It was like the night of your honeymoon, mingled with your first trip … to Baskin Robbins.

A cappella

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

A cappella: (adj. or adv.) {with regard to choral music} without instrumental accompaniment.

I was sixteen years old and had a musical group. We thought we were great, which is the necessary profile to maintaining the immaturity of being sixteen years of age. We had recently won a talent contest at our school, so we were over-pumped with our abilities and found other people’s instruction repugnant.

A gentleman asked us if we would like to record the song we had sung at the talent contest for his local radio station, to be played the following Sunday for the vast “tens of listeners” tuning in.

Of course, we agreed, fully aware of how fortunate this man was to have such a talented group of young people coming in to his little station to share their unique abilities. We arrived at the studio and found that there was no piano. We required one, so it seemed like we were stumped, with no recourse. The radio station owner ran from the room and quickly returned, holding in his hand–a pitch-pipe.

He said, “Why don’t you sing it a cappella, and I’ll give you the note to start on, and we can record it?”

Well, we had never sung our song without accompaniment, but after all, being the best singers in Delaware County, it seemed like something we could take in stride and accomplish with no difficulty whatsoever.

So he blew a C on his pitch-pipe and we began to sing, as he recorded. We struggled a bit. None of us realized how dependent we were on the strands flowing from the keyboard for our sense of self-confidence. Yet we persevered.

When we reached the end of the song, I looked over and noticed that our recording engineer had a grimace on his face. He paused and said, “Would you like to try that again?”

Fully inflated with arrogance, I replied, “Why? It sounded good to me.”

So he blew the pitch-pipe and played back the last note we sang, and explained that we had fallen a full tone in the process of singing our song. Still fueled with immaturity and impudence, I said, “What difference does it make–as long as we ended up together?”

I added, “Perhaps your pitch-pipe is broken.”

This last assertion was quickly disproven when he played back the entire recording and it became obvious where we lost our way. Yet because we were young, impetuous and just damned lazy, we refused to record it again, insisting that “it sounded fine.”

Faithful to his word, he played our a cappella version the following Sunday morning on the radio, and amazingly enough, no one commented to us about it–good or bad.

That was the day that I gained great respect for singing a cappella–and also for the value of honoring the pitch.

In all facets of life, if you don’t stay in key, you will end up with a whole lot of sour notes.