Carroll's 55th Street
Carroll's 55th Street
This being the first jam of 2014 and although the festivities of the holiday season seemed far behind us, we still seemed to have a bit of the 2013 hangover left in us. Alan wasn't to join us this week, so I was solo on my guitar duties. In many respects I knew I would be adding lead guitar parts at home so I focused more on rhythm as we played instead a taking balanced approached, which I would have done if not knowing about the abilities to add parts in the mixdown. In any case, it did seem to do much good as many of my tempos dragged and we had trouble getting into good grooves. It was a struggled and by the end of the night, it knocked Kevin off his ass. We really couldn't even finish the After Midnight as that collapsed under it own agony. It really isn't as bad as I make it out and the recording can be quite enjoyable.
After recording the jam, I discovered the recording of the first 15-minute segment of track 5, Rich's vocals, came up corrupt and was unusable. This meant we had no Brotpen vocals during the Uncle John's Band, but they came back during for the Hey Pocky Way and lasted throughout the rest of the night. Additionally, I was planning the record Rich's piano using 2 microphones, the PZM on the inside and a Shure SM57 underneath. Unfortunately, I forgot to arm for recording track 3, which was for the PZM microphone. This meant we only recording the piano using the SM57. In any case, the piano come through good enough. Finally, without Alan, or any other guitarist jamming with us, I decided to add additional guitar, after the fact, at home during the mixdown.
One of the real cool serendipitous moments related to this jam was when I was performing a rendering of the song Let It Bleed. It isn't a song we do often and I have a brain freeze on remembering its name. While pondering the name of the song at the keyboard ready to type in its title, I noticed a paper-cut open up on my finger letting me know the title and there it was. Some thing to remind you that there is a freak looking down upon us. Wow, Freak Out.