Chicago musician, storyteller, and folklorist Joseph Sobol earned
the Homegrown CD Award this month for his very accomplished Citternalia.
The ancient Romans commemorated their god of agriculture each December
with a licentious revel called a saturnalia, and Sobol’s CD is a veritable
orgy of stringed instrument music featuring the guitar’s old cousin,
the cittern. Sobol employs a variety of tunings on both ten- and 12-string
models built by English luthier Stefan Sobell. On the album he also
plays a 12-fret Wayne Henderson OM-style steel-string, a five-string
banjo, and an acoustic bass.
Citternalia’s repertoire is grounded in traditional Irish music—jigs,
reels, hornpipes, and airs--and even the contemporary pieces hew to
the ancient forms. Joining Sobol on several tracks are some splendid
practitioners of Irish music, including Paddy League on bodhran and
percussion, John Williams on accordion and concertina, Laurence Nugent
on flute and whistle, and Brendan McKinney on uilleann pipes. The presentation
is more formal than you’d encounter at a seisún at your local
pub, but the playing is impeccable and lively throughout, and the whole
has consistency and clarity of intent often lacking in D.I.Y. projects.
Preparing the Material
The project was more than a decade in the making, although actual recording
was accomplished over several months last year. Sobol had extensive
training as a classical guitarist and originally intended this instrumental
debut to be an all-guitar album. In 1990 he discovered the cittern and
found that some of the sounds that he had been imagining on the guitar
came more easily on the cittern. He spent the next several years refining
his technique on the instrument, and he developed a unique and fluid
right-hand style that melds classical, steel-string, and Celtic influences.
Lightning-fast ornaments pepper his melodic lines, and arpeggios lilt
off the fingerboard effortlessly. As his style was evolving, Sobol delved
into the fertile Irish tradition around Chicago, and his playing reflects
a deep understanding of the subtleties of the idiom.
Sobol feels that the long time between conception and completion made
his project better. "Sometimes a project is much better when it
isn’t forced to fruition too soon and takes a long time to ripen,"
he says. "By the time I got into the studio, I really had a lot
that I wanted to say musically. Not every set of tunes was something
that I’d been playing for a long time, but the style and the approach
had been honed and refined over a long period of time."
Recording and Mixing
Sobol joined forces with local Chicago engineer Victor Sanders to realize
his project. According to Sobol, "Victor’s a gear head, but within
a limited budget. It’s a small house studio, but he has real good stuff."
The actual recording room was a cozy third-story bedroom space that
had been divided into a small control room and a playing area. Despite
the modest setup, the sonics are first-rate throughout, with fat, shimmering
sounds from the strings and full-bodied tones from the reed and wind
instruments.
They began by laying down all of Sobol’s cittern and guitar parts.
"Because this was the first instrumental album I’d done under my
own name, I was nervous about that," Sobol says, "so we recorded
my parts first, cleaned them up, and mixed them so that we had really
solid tracks." The basic mic setup was a pair of AKG 451s in a
coincident (X = Y) pattern and a third mic with contrasting tone characteristics,
usually an AKG 414 TL2. The mic signals were sent via John Hardy M1
preamps through a Tascam mixing board to ADAT decks. No signal processing
was added during the recording phase. Once Sobol was comfortable with
his performances on the basic takes, the ADAT tracks were dumped onto
a Macintosh and digitally edited using Digidesign’s Sound Designer II.
Track cleanup and tweaking took full advantage of the digital domain
to fix notes, splice takes, and do punches. "There are still a
couple of notes I’d like back, but we got most of ’em! Those computer
editors are pretty amazing," says Sobol. The polished tracks were
then mixed back to two channels of the ADAT, with the signals of the
451s melded and the alternate mic providing the stereo spread.
The next step was to take the tape to Zan McLeod’s home studio near
Washington, D.C., to record Paddy League’s percussion parts. "That
was a real demonstration to me of what a convenient format ADAT is,"
says Sobol. "Paddy lives in that area, I was going to the East
Coast anyway, and it was easier for me to go to him than to fly him
into Chicago. Paddy set up in the hall of Zan’s townhouse and did eight
brilliant tracks of percussion in one afternoon. I took that back to
Chicago and did the rest of the overdubs—mostly one at a time—playing
to my tracks."
Despite elaborate stacks of tracks on some pieces, most of the project
required just two ADAT decks. When all the overdubs were complete, they
dumped the tracks back into the computer for mixing to DAT. Subtle Lexicon
reverb and some slight compression was used sparingly. Mastering and
final assembly was completed by Sanders.
Finishing the Package
The disc is nicely presented in a colorful package designed by a professional
graphic artist. The cover sports a playful painting of anthropomorphized
stringed instruments cavorting in a glade. "I had the title for
the record before anything else," Sobol says. "I loved the
idea of a little orgy of citterns, and that naturally painted a picture
in my mind of instruments dancing by moonlight. My friend Kim Hoffman
is a wonderful painter, and her magical realist style really worked
well on this. I gave her a verbal image of it, and she just went to
town."
Sobol feels satisfied with both the process and the product of his
recording efforts. He says, "I don’t usually feel this way about
a project, but because it was my concept and because I took my time
doing it, I really wouldn’t change anything about the way this one came
out. On another project I’d do more live stuff and wouldn’t be quite
so meticulous about getting my own tracks perfect." He adds, "Sitting
down in the studio really makes you work on your chops. It was a great
musical exercise, and I feel like I learned a lot and my playing improved
during the process."
Citternalia is selling well, and Sobol is about to order another printing.
He plans to use his $1,000 Sweetwater Sound gift certificate to acquire
some P.A. equipment. He has his eye on the Mackie 408 powered board
and will probably get some speakers while he is at it.
CDs and MP3s are available from www.efolkmusic.com.
—Paul Kotapish
Acoustic Guitar’s Homegrown CD Awards is a year-long spotlight
on CDs recorded and released by acoustic musicians. Winners are profiled
in the Stage and Studio department and receive a $1,000 gift certificate
from Sweetwater Sound’s music technology catalog. The deadline for application
was September 1, 2000.
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine,
October 2000, No.94.
Check out the other
winners online.
