MidiMike

In Euphoria at this time, I am the keyboard player and I do some back-up vocals and percussion.  

I get to set up in the recording control room and listen to the studio speakers for monitors. I can look through the glass and see the other players; drums in isolation booth, guitar amp and bass rig in separate areas with go-bo’s and sound partitions avoiding spill-over.  Vocalist was in place in booth, but we are doing scratch vocals now for the most part to keep the musicians on track.  The studio is using reel-to-reels back then, but they are great machines and the board is more than I had gotten my hands on at the time.  To let you know I was the performer here.  I was not the engineer and I kept my mouth shut.  [OK, maybe that was a hidden lesson if we think about it!] 

To set up the story a little, when Euphoria plays live and the guitar player breaks a string (in our band this happens all the time and even our BASS GUITAR player breaks strings regularly!) we have to stop the song.  The guitar players will grab another guitar or change if needed…… 

And no matter where we were when we had to stop playing the song, we started from the same place and continued the song to the end.  So when we came into the studio, we knew what songs we wanted to record and in what order, but we also knew which part of each song should be on the demo.   We did not want to record a bunch of full songs all the way through.  When we were ready to record, the vocalist would call out what song and Verse 1 and 2….  Chorus 2…….,  Verse 3, Solo – then Verse…..  Whatever it was that we wanted to record.  We did not play all the way through and then have the tape ‘cut’ to those areas;  it is all we recorded.  We caught the sound guy off guard.  He must have initially thought we were going to go way over time.  As it happened, we did all the cover tune sections we wanted and had time over to play with an original tune the guitar player was working on. 

Oh, yeah, there is still a lesson for the recording engineer in all this.  He told me during a number of conversations (I asked about stuff after all, but I tried not to back-seat-drive the recordings) that he had struggled for two years on getting the drum booth tight.  He had changed the drum heads multiple times.  He bought more and more expensive microphones.  He used the latest gates and processing gear.  He moved everything up, down and sideways.  He changed soundproofing a million times.   

Here is what he said to me that day, “All this time I thought I didn’t have the right drum booth and gear.  It wasn’t until tonight that I figured out that I just did not have the right drummer!”.   

Unfortunately the other band members would not let me tell the drummer that for a long time in fear his head would get really big and explode!  

Journey – Separate Ways

Black Crowes – Hard to Handle

Yes – Long Distance

Yes – Changes

The Who – Can You See the Real Me?

Shooting Star – Last Chance

Queensryche – Jet City Woman