Will It Work Two Hours From Now?

Published: Thu, 06/10/21

them for their spruce tops, and if, while I was determining whether or not to pay for the guitar that became my OO-18, someone had leaned over and said, "Ya know, those mid-fifties Martins, that's the period where they could only get spruce from the eastern slopes of the Adirondacks," I doubt I would have put my wallet back in my pocket and walked out. For all I know, they really did usually make Martins out of spruce harvested exclusively from the western slopes of the Adirondacks, and my favorite axe only became a guitar instead of a deck chair by some fortunate twist of fate.

I'm thinking about this at the moment because I just had a conversation with my friend Mark about recording equipment, specifically, how much of it will suffice. What I know about recording is about as thorough and definitive as my knowledge of fine tonewoods. By and large, I feel the same way about my gear as I do about my transportation: Is it working? Will it still be working two hours from now when I'm actually using it? Is it at least nominally pleasing to look at? Cool; it's good enough for me. So when it comes to recording, I don't own very many microphones, and I only use one of them for just about everything, and a second one for the rest. The one mic tends to go through the one preamp, into the one interface, and when I go to mix, I use the same couple of plugins every time – the compressor I like, the eq I like, the reverb I like. Am I using them right? Are there other "flavors" I could be trying? No question. But these ones seem pretty good, and there's a lot I could learn about them by simply continuing to work with the same ones over and over, rather than continuously trying out and learning to use new gear.

The idea, as usual, is to remove friction. If it works to swing the one mic on the one stand into about the same position in front of me every time I record, then I can start recording sooner. If I'm choosing a mic, and choosing a preamp, and worrying about the precise angle of the mic in relationship to my guitar, my voice, the room, the polar axis, well...I'll be engineering all day, and recording very little, if at all. It's the same reason I use an overhead mic (the same mic I record with) to shoot and stream my lessons: because if I start putting on a lavalier mic, and have to strap a wireless transmitter to my belt, and run a wire up through my shirt, and get the mic clipped on just so, pointing in the right direction, and make sure the battery pack is charged, and turned on, for heaven's sake, and transmitting signal properly to the recording software, and then have to unplug the whole arrangement just to step away and make sure my hair doesn't look any weirder than usual and the camera's at the right angle...well, forget it. I won't even want to shoot video at that point; I'll be too uptight and uncomfortable and annoyed. So yeah, the overhead mic has a little more room sound, and it's not as up close and personal as the lav, but when I use the overhead mic, I'm more relaxed, and I have more fun shooting (or streaming), and it just feels like I'm sitting in the room, talking about guitar playing. So that's how I roll.

There are all kinds of ways to remove friction. Getting familiar with a certain kind of music, the forms and terms of a particular genre, is one of them. If you play blues, the more you listen to, learn and play in that style, the more your knowledge and awareness accumulates and the less specifics you have to absorb with each subsequent piece of repertoire you take on. Think about it: if you've been playing for a while, you probably don't even think about the fact that you're playing a twelve-bar form, that you're working with certain kinds of scales, that you're going to be playing certain voicings, that the groove is supposed to feel a certain way. With much of that now ingrained, you can focus on learning the new song: what makes this particular blues song different from the previous blues songs you've learned? Which implies that many things about it will be the same as the last several songs you learned, and therefor not something you need to worry about.

Now, arguably, every song is its own thing, and if you're going to play it exactly like so-and-so recorded it originally, then, yes, you've got your work cut out for you. And there's plenty of value in such a specific, attentive approach. But I have to admit, getting it all down perfectly like that makes me feel like I'm paying attention to the spruce again. I'd rather get the song to work as a song rather than as an artifact, get the song to work as a point of departure rather than as a recreation of a specific recording. It's a tricky proposition: I do feel like to some extent one earns the right to make that choice, and some days I feel I've earned it in spades, while others I feel like I could spend the next twenty years getting caught up on all I've missed along the way. But in general, my take with songs resembles my take on amplifiers, audio gear and the rest: Is it working? Will it work two hours from now? Cool; let's quit obsessing and make something.

This week's Youtube lesson is all about putting blues licks over a walking bass line in E. You can find the lesson here:

Walking Bass Blues In E

...and you can download the tab here:

Download the Tab

More soon,

David

P.S. For anyone still wondering about last week's tune, "Mueslissippi Ibis" is a near-anagram for "Mississippi Blues," the classic 1942 blues in A by William Brown. This month in The Fingerstyle Five, we're all about improvising on the blues in A; for more details on the membership and to sign up, go to Fingerstyle Five Info and Registration