Though I’ve most recently dedicated my efforts to recording my material and helping others play their music, I’ve begun to turn a portion of my energies to performing my own material live. There comes a time when I spend too much time in the studio that I simply must get out and make a sound outside of my own head. There’s something very oppressive about recording music in that you are always chasing the definitive version of the composition, striving to capture magic in the performance of it, since it presumably will live forever. After a while, trying to play everything perfectly at all times gets so stale. For magic also happens when you spread your wings musically and take chances, risking mistakes or train wrecks for the possibility of finding something new in yourself or the music.

I figured that it was time I put a band together to play the music I’ve been working on so I can finally let everyone hear it. The problem, however, is that making music as an adult carries with it more headaches, more entrapments, more catches. When you’re a kid, you make music with your friends. You dream together. No one has anything and no one has anything to lose. My adult performing career has been largely solo, so I’ve not butted up against the differences much, but beyond a certain age, musicians of any quality become more scarce. As they age, musicians play for different reasons than simply to become their heroes. They balance music with other responsibilities. They work less for a collective good, such as a band, and even less for a “solo artist” for fear of being exploited. That leaves me with some challenges, since my latest efforts feature full arrangements. Only a band can do this stuff. What’s worse, I’ve become more keyboard-centric, experimenting with different sounds and more complex arrangements.

I’ve written repeatedly about how I’d be quite content simply playing bass. It’s what I got into this for. If I’m going to play my music in a band, I’ve got to be the bass player. But how do I handle all of these keyboards? Keyboardists are very hard to come by. Hence the reason I’ve gotten more calls for keyboards than anything else in recent years. It’s too early to hire a keyboard player outright, though that’s probably what will have to happen if I’m going to get the music to sound right. What to do?

I have a drummer who can sing backup, an old friend of mine. I’m courting guitarists at the moment. After that, I’m putting all of my runaway versatility to work. I predict that when you see me play live, I shall go “all Geddy Lee on your ass.” Anyone who knows Rush knows that Geddy Lee plays bass, keys and guitar and sings too. He often uses his feet to get things played when his hands aren’t free. Good enough for me. I shall be playing keyboards and bass, sometimes in the same song. I have decided that I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna be the bass player or nobody is. I’ve set up my synthesizer so that I can play bass parts with my left hand when I need to have a keyboard in the arrangement. I’ll also be singing lead. I’ll also be working my ass off! :~) However, I’ll be joined by a stampede of unicorns, all wearing necklaces of hen’s teeth. If I think my music is different and special, why shouldn’t it take some heroic measures to perform it?

I toyed with the idea of using a sequencer for a bit. I got together with my drummer friend to give it a whirl. When you play with a sequence, it usually means that the drummer must listen to a click on headphones, so he can be sure not to lose time with the computer. Computers don’t listen to what everyone else is playing, so you’re a slave to their petrified renditions. We got through the song, and yes, I was playing bass and keyboards were coming out of the speakers. But it felt like tracking a record. When my drummer suggested we play through a different song that I hadn’t prepared with the sequencer, I roughed it out alone at the keyboard. Even though I hadn’t split the keyboard to cover the bass parts and it sounded like it had holes in the arrangement, it felt more like music than what we had played before. I had made my decision. I must bring my full abilities to bear and do something risky.

As I prepare for this undertaking, I’m finding it so stimulating that I can’t wait to get at it. I’ll absolutely have something that is worth watching. Let’s see how much damn music I can make with 3 people.

Well, at least if you’re a musician engaged in self-promotion. I’ve come to believe that the philosophy of the “artist as open book” is terribly flawed. If you pollute your mind with the prevalent electronic chatter about the new music business made possible by “direct-to-fan” solutions, social networking and all that rot, you might be led to believe that using technology to get as close to your “fans” (what an awful word) as possible is the goal. Though I use these tools in the promotion of my music and recordings, I’ve been thinking about how it can blow up in your face too.

Two bands I’ve written about here, Led Zeppelin and Kiss, would have ruined their careers by becoming too intimate with their audiences. Yes, perhaps things are different now, but what would these two bands have been if the lives of their members had been documented in a readily accessible resource by the members themselves?

In the mythology of Led Zeppelin, you had deals with the devil, obscure symbols to represent the members of the group, drugs, disasters, groupies, and music that was, according to a documentary I saw about them, “Howlin’ Wolf meets the Loch Ness Monster.” I don’t believe a single one of these particular entrapments was ever addressed directly by the group. I don’t think they ever published an informal piece to “set the record straight.” The audience was left to imagine just about anything. The myth grew and grew. It was anything you wanted it to be, except like you. There were no limits to what you could discover in Led Zeppelin. It could not end because it wasn’t real in the first place. Opening the book would have blown it all to hell.

Even Led Zeppelin album cover art kept the band at a distance. They seemed to live on a planet designed just for them, a mystical place that featured monuments to gods whose names you dared not speak and rolling green Celtic geography that was literally hell and gone from Main Street USA or Times Square. They managed to perpetuate an image of dark magic, without saying a word about it.

If it existed, what could Jimmy Page’s blog have said that wouldn’t have ruined everything?

“Had a costume fitting today. I hope they get the dragon right this time. I like dragons.”

“I took a plane to Los Angeles after the show to meet this 13-year-old model I’m just mad about. I know what it looks like, but she’s just incredible.”

“I want to thank all you guys for coming out to the show tonight. Percy, Bonzo, Jonsey and I had a blast. We can’t wait to come back to Pittsburgh.”

“I’m thinking Peter needs to lose a few pounds. I’m worried about him.”

“I’ve got such a headache today. I must send Coco out for some more aspirin before we leave for soundcheck.”

“Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been soooooo busy with the new album. We can’t think of a good title for it though. I want to use freaky drawings and a tarot card for the cover, but Jonesy thinks it’s a stupid idea. Maybe it could be a contest! Leave your suggestions for the name of our fourth album in the comments. If we use your title, we’ll send you a signed copy a week before it’s released to radio!”

“I can’t stop thinking about burgers! Damn this heroin!”

I’m pretty good with the language, but I can’t think of an appropriate superlative to describe the lameness that would have ensued. Good Christ, Jimmy Page wasn’t human like us! He didn’t eat breakfast or get up for school or go to the dentist. He just made otherworldly sounds with guitars and laser beams went off behind him in all directions when he did it! A blog would have ruined him. A superstar must be a mystery. Maybe that’s why we have so few of them now.

Kiss might have blogged in character, which could have worked, but judging by those fake letters in Kiss Alive, the blogs probably would have been written by someone in the Glickman/Marks office and sucked.

Insert palaver about being rich and famous, hyper-sexual, demonic, from another planet, and something about cats and junk here.

It was so much better to wonder who they were under the makeup. Were they murderers? Was Satan involved? Was the drummer really rescued from death by a panther? Again, the mystery of Kiss made it work. Gene Simmons has stated since the 90s that Kiss were trying be the heavy metal Beatles. They never said it in the 70s though. On planet Kiss, the Beatles did not exist. Get it?

Kiss was best served by others writing about them (provided they could nudge the writers in the right direction). Every time Gene was pressed to explain the meaning of the fire and blood tricks, he could never make sense of it, even when he was in character. A personal blog would have muddied the waters even more. Without the distance, Kiss could never have been superheroes.

So, since I’m at least as interesting as Jimmy Page and Gene Simmons, I have to be careful when I blog. I could ruin everything. It’s a good thing that I do this telepathically. And since I’m getting off of all those pills it’s going so much faster now. Thanks to Satan and his hounds, Myra and Otis, I’m well protected here. I can almost see Earth, though these lasers cast quite a shadow across the great billows of rainbow smoke that surround the palace when I awaken. Regardless, at all times, music flows from me as breath, surrounding you with love.

I was playing back some tracks that I had recorded for a song called “True Star”. I had long since decided that these tracks were complete. However, as I tried to work up a preliminary mix, I became convinced that something was wrong with the bass. There wasn’t anything I could do to this track to get the instrument to sound alive. What happened? I thought I had this. The performance of the part was great, but the tone was just DOA.

I can’t understand how I didn’t notice the problem during the tracking stage because I was recording the bass direct and was convinced that I was capturing everything I needed to sculpt the bass sound during the mixing process. It had a thunderous quality to it in my cans and I hardly ever EQ anything on the way in, for fear that I might filter out a crucial part of the signal that I might need later.

OK, a lot of jargon there. If you’re not in my head or not a recording engineer, I might have lost you.

Direct – Recording direct means that you’re recording an instrument by connecting its output directly to the input of your mixing console or recording device, without the use of a conventional instrument amplifier. It is fairly common practice to record electric bass or electronic keyboards direct. Yes, sometimes you put a mic in front of an amplifier, but for bass, I only do that when I need the sound of a speaker flopping around.

“EQ on the way in” – An equalizer is a tool used in audio that enables you to cut or boost certain parts of a signal’s frequency range. Think of it as a high class tone control. Some recording engineers apply equalization to instruments to alter their tone before they’ve recorded anything. The drawback to this practice is that when you record all of the instruments to separate tracks and then play them back together, some of them may require a different tone altogether. If you’ve captured the instruments as purely as possible, you have a better shot at using equalizers to get the sound you want. If you’ve EQ’d on the way in, you might not have the frequency spectrum that you need to cut and boost.

For example, assume that while recording guitars, you notice that the guitars are a little boomy (too much bass), so you use an equalizer to make them sound thinner. The sound is filtered but the guitars sound better. During mixing however, you decide to go with one guitar for the song instead of two, so you mute one. That one guitar, which you thinned out with an equalizer “on the way in” now sounds too thin (not enough bass). If you’d have recorded the guitar without any EQ, you might have that fullness you want. You might be able to use an equalizer to bring it out. However, you recorded the guitars thin by equalizing them first. The lower, fuller part of the frequency spectrum was filtered out and never recorded. Therefore, it can never be brought out with EQ. You’re hosed. I knew an engineer who used to call recording “taking a picture.” It was a pretty good metaphor in this case. If you cut off the top of grandma’s head when you framed the shot, you’re never going to make it appear when you print the picture. Her head was never in the shot. You’re hosed.

Oddly enough, I’ve read that Todd Rundgren always EQ’ed on the way in. In the Meat Loaf autobiography To Hell and Back, Meat describes the problems it caused when he hated Todd’s mixes of Bat Out Of Hell and tried to give the job to another engineer. Eek!

Cans – Another word for headphones.

So what was up with my bass sound?

Impedance mismatch. Impedance is resistance to alternating current, but it’s not important that I explain the physics in detail. Suffice it to say that electric guitars and basses are high impedance sources and mixer inputs are generally suited to low impedance sources. I recorded my original bass track using an input that was supposed to have been designed for direct recording of guitars. Somebody’s guitar maybe, but not mine. The impedance rating was just too low. After a lot of research, reading of specifications for my various pieces of gear and experiments with 4 different methods of recording the bass, I determined that due to impedance mismatching, I simply wasn’t taking the picture of my bass.

Because of physics and junk, when you have an impedance mismatch condition, your bass signal loses a lot of the frequency spectrum and sounds dull and lifeless. I had plenty of low end, which I heard in my headphones, but when it came time to mix, my signal didn’t have the goods. So much for these new-fangled digital audio interfaces, eh? “You don’t need a direct box! Plug your guitar or bass right into the input of your insert audio interface model of your choice here!” What nonsense, at least where the Echo Layla 3G, my interface, is concerned.

So, like I would have done 15 years ago, and should have done a long time ago, I bought a new direct box, which converts a signal from high impedance to low impedance. I had one back then and always used it for bass (before I went digital). I re-recorded the “True Star” bass part in short order. I just played it back and wow! Do I love Fender Precision Basses! When you record them correctly, they sound fantastic, right off the pickups, no amp required.

Like Levon Helm said when listening to the piano track of “Rag Mama Rag,” it’s easy when you know how. Despite my adoption of new technologies, sometimes what I used to do still works best.