January 14, 2006
The Process
Written by Jam Malone on January 14, 2006 11:52 AM
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Recording Girth McDürchstein's 'The Return'
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I plan to spend this long weekend, the first time off I’ve had since the new year, relaxing in a home I’ve rented in nearby Lake Bluff. Before I try to forget about my grueling past two weeks, I thought I’d take a moment to share with you, fans of Abysmal Crucifix and readers of this blog, the typical process by which we record our albums.
First, obviously, Girth writes the songs. He usually writes very quickly. He thinks about new song ideas, allows them to brew in his head while we tour to support our previous material, and after a few weeks of sitting at home doing nothing, I receive a phone call from a panting, maniacal Girth. He demands that I come to the studio, then plays for me what he has written. Often, he composes more than an album’s worth of material in this time.
At this point I should note emphatically that Girth does not allow any of us to participate in the initial writing phase. He won’t allow us to “taint” his vision with our lesser ideas. The entire band separates from him for extended periods of time — as I said, usually a few weeks, but sometimes as long as six months — while he works. When we finally get that call, we all know we’ll have complete songs awaiting us when we get to the studio. Depending on the musical complexity, Girth will sometimes record rough, acoustic demos on a four-track tape recorder. Usually, he just plays them for us at the studio.
Once he presents the songs to us, we then can interact with him. We will first narrow down the batch of songs he’s written — usually more than 20, all told — to about 15. It takes us hours — days, sometimes — for the entire band to agree on which songs we don’t like. Usually, each of us will have to put up with a song we hate because we’re out-voted. It balances out, though, because the others will invariably feel the same way about certain songs that we champion.
There are always some songs we all agree that we hate, and those are the ones that are simply abandoned at the start. Sometimes Girth will file them away, fine-tuning it into a song we like, or just scrapping the music and saving the lyrics (or vice-versa). But there are occasions where a song is so resoundingly bad that even he realizes his misstep and tosses it out.
Once we’ve narrowed the tracklist a bit, we start the arranging process. Arranging — and eventual demo recording — is what we’ve spent much of the past two weeks working on. Girth will come in with an acoustic guitar and play us the chords and melody. Nine times out of ten, Girth will play to us a line and say, “Right there, I want a pipe organ to play ‘duh-duh-dee,’” where “duh-duh-dee” represents a rhythmic progression of musical notes. He can hear these things in his head, but he can’t articulate them on the page or in real musical terms, aside from just singing a few bars of what he wants.
As I have a Masters degree in music composition and arranging from Brandeis University, I often find myself interpreting Girth’s primitive musicality. As we progress through the arrangements, marking the basslines, keyboard lines, alternate guitar lines, and various melodies and harmonies Girth wants, we hit stumbling blocks.
“Something needs to go here,” he’ll say at a dead spot, “but I don’t know what.”
This is the band’s opportunity to shine. Depending on what he wants, instrument-wise — though sometimes he doesn’t even know that much, so we’re all springboarding various ideas until something clicks — we’ll spend a great deal of time nailing down a combination of what we’d like to hear and what he feels would work best.
Although we arrange as a team, Girth has always received sole credit on our liner notes. As I’ve stated, nine times out of ten he knows exactly what he wants, and when he doesn’t, he discovers what he wanted all along. We’re just there to help.
With the arranging done, we play through the songs in a very rough manner. We record it, of course, but it’s just a straight run-through, almost like the live act we will play on a semi-nightly basis for months or years after we finish the album. We blow straight through them all, with only a vague sense of mixing so that the instruments we want to capture aren’t buried (so we don’t lose the spirit of our arrangements), and we have our demo reel.
Girth makes a copy for everyone in the band, and it’s essentially our duty to listen to it constantly, whenever we’re not recording or rehearsing. We need to feel the songs in our blood so we can just go into the studio and nail it.
At least, that’s what Girth says. It never happens that way. Never. Case in point: we put the reel together last Wednesday afternoon, and Girth announced, “This evening, we rehearse ‘The Return’” — the title track and the first song on the list (more on the list in a minute) — “so we can record it tomorrow.” Well, we rehearsed it, came in early on Thursday morning, and started to record. Girth likes to record every single instrument separately so he can layer the mix according to whatever insane sounds he hears in his head. Let’s just assume this takes six times as long to perfect, as there are five primary instruments in the band, plus vocals. But this doesn’t even take into account some of the lesser musicians in the group (Margo is a beautiful woman and a fair drummer, but she is by no means Tommy Janofsky) require more time to perfect the track, plus the huge number of overdubs. This is why it takes so long to get our albums out.
At any rate, we spent all of Thursday and Friday from 10AM to after midnight both days, with a few breaks for lunch and dinner attempting to record this song. The other unfortunate part about our recording process is Girth’s insistence that we all remain in the general vicinity of the studio — often in the lounge, sometimes in the booth, sometimes outside (though with this Chicago weather, that only happened on Thursday, when we had an exceptionally warm day) — but we can’t leave for various technical reasons.
We finally got the tracking done for the title track, “The Return,” on Friday night. It sounds wonderful, for a rough mix. We still need to add harmony vocals and overdubs, but the song itself is pretty solid. It may only be one song, but I’m happy with the outcome so far.
In our past experience, I can tell you that we’ll repeat this recording process for weeks, possibly even months, before Girth finally says, “Okay, let’s send this fucker to mastering.” His perfectionism has gotten slightly worse now that he considers himself an artiste, a composer of such high esteem that we must create his exact musical thoughts or he’ll scrap the whole project. This is why he was so angry about the You Can Touch It for a Quarter sessions being released by our former drummer, Tommy Janofsky. It’s a fine album that I still listen to sometimes, but Girth hates it because it isn’t “perfect.” He and I differ philosophically on the definition of “perfection,” but I won’t get into that here.
I will say, finally, that the tracklist for this album is different than in previous albums, excepting The Hedge, because Girth planned it as a “concept album,” with a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. Girth prefers to record these songs in sequential order. With our earlier “standalone” material, we would often record them in whatever order Girth had presented to us originally, plow through them, and then assemble the final tracklist during the mix. It is difficult to coordinate the flow of an album with the songs that have been written for it. As the music scene has become less single-dominated and more album-oriented, sometimes the wrong track order can destroy an otherwise fine album.
But Girth has surprised me twice now by not only writing an album of brilliant songs but by having the foresight to arrange them in their most effective order, right from the start. And this is one of the reasons why, despite his whiny tantrums and the creative shackles he forces us to wear, we all remain loyal to his vision and to our band.
I hope this answers the many letters and emails we’ve gotten over the years about our recording process. If not, feel free to email me directly at jam.malone at girthmcdurchstein.com
Enjoy your weekend,
Jam
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