July 28, 2003

Tuning Issues

Yesterday's recording session was a bit off-kilter because everyone was still a little wrecked from the previous night's show. We got a lot accomplished, nonetheless, finally finishing all the bass, putting down the sketchy basics of some of the sound effects, and getting a start on the guitar.

All in all, the rhythm stuff went remarkably smoothly. Now that we're in the guitar phase, though, we're faced with a new set of challenges. Yesterday, we hit what was pretty much our first snag: a big tuning kerfuffle. Tuning seems like it would be straightforward, but with multi-track recording, string instruments, and high fidelity, keeping everything in tune with everything else can be a real struggle, particularly when, like us, you're trying to use a lot of second-hand (I believe the technical term is "vintage") equipment. Absolute perfection is not possible, nor even really desirable: it's possible to be so utterly accurately machine-certified in tune that it sounds bad, unnatural. You can quite literally be so in tune that you're out of tune. The trick is to try to manage your tuning, with the goal of ensuring that the degree of out-of-tuneness is going to work with the track you're working on. To make matters more complicated there are times when you want to have the guitars a bit out of tune for an occasional wake 'em up sonic assault that is itself an "instrument" in the arrangement, or more often when you want a pretty chorusing effect, or even more subtly when you want to make a wall of guitars sound a bit "thicker." On the other hand, too much chorusing in a wall of guitars can make them sound too distant.

What I'm saying is, Tuning Issues can be way more subjective than you'd think, a matter of opinion, taste, debate. You can spend hours arguing about it, and I've witnessed and been involved in some quite bitter such arguments. The tuner says you're in tune, you've got a great sound going, two out of three engineers surveyed think it's pretty close, but it doesn't work with the track. You fiddle with the intonation, try continually re-tuning and punching in every four bars, try a dozen different guitars, listen to the playback muting the other tracks one by one to see if there's another culprit. Maybe you're hitting the guitar too hard; maybe too softly. Maybe it's the humidity or the temperature in the studio. Maybe you should change the strings. Maybe you shouldn't have changed those strings, that sounds even worse. Maybe there's just something wrong with your ears. Man, you should have just gone to graduate school after all. Forget this rock and roll stuff.

Sometimes there's something about the room, some angle or acoustics-affecting plane, that exaggerates the overtones, making things sound out of tune when they "really" aren't.

That was the case in the biggest Tuning Freakout of my recording career, the Great Bass Tuning Debacle of '97 (during the recording of Revenge is Sweet and So are You.) We eventually reached the conclusion, hotly contested by the studio owners, that something about the control room at the studio made the bass sound out of tune no matter what we did. So how did we check the tuning? We made cassettes at various points in the tracking and mixing and went out to listen to them in the van. A very time-consuming solution, but the only one available. The second biggest tuning freakout was during Alcatraz, when we finally figured out that the two different classic/vintage/antique two-inch tape decks we were using for the guitar overdubs ran at speeds that varied too infinitesimally to be caught by the normal calibration process. I blamed my guitar, and I blamed myself, I cursed God, the Universe, and the day I was born, but it never occurred to me to blame or curse the tape deck. Once we figured it out, we were able to recalibrate using special tones and a special gizmo and everything worked out, but there were a couple of days there where I felt like I was losing my mind. Needless to say, when you're forced to obsess about technical things like that, your playing can suffer. There's some guitar stuff that was supposed to be on Alcatraz that never happened because I was too rattled to make my fingers work properly and we never had to time to revisit them once the problem was solved. It can be a psychologically shattering experience.

What happened last night was nowhere near that serious. When I referred to it as a Tuning Freakout, engineer/studio dude Mark Keaton said "this isn't a Tuning Freakout. It's just tuning." He's right. Tuning is part of the process, you have to do it, and it's always hard. This fell well short of Freakout level; it didn't even really reach Episode status. Still, by the time I started trying to play my parts on "Everybody Knows You're Crying" I was sounding a bit like a retarded, thumbless five year old who couldn't tell his IV from his V. Ted had just recorded what I think is the most beautiful, perfect guitar part ever to appear on an MTX record, and I just wasn't equal to the important task of complementing it. That's first on the agenda today. I hope my nerves can take it.

Here's Ted, trying to see if using my quirky batwing would more closely match the tune-scape of my earlier quirky batwing track. It kind of did. (That's camera shy Kevin Army's head on the left.)

tedcoronet.jpg

And of course, the whole time I have this little spinning digital display of the depleting recording budget in my head. You know how the gallons and price numbers scroll around when you're getting gas, or on that big national debt sign in New York? That's the kind of thing I mean.

Anyway, don't worry about it yet.

And trust me: our music is really a lot better than it sounds.

Posted by Dr. Frank at July 28, 2003 05:45 PM | TrackBack
Comments

That's hilarious. It's nice to know that I'm not alone in my "tuning hell" when it comes to the studio. I almost ended my own life once because of exactly what you described.

I love the out of tune parts on Alcatraz.

Posted by: Matt Riggle at July 29, 2003 07:34 AM