Roy Curry, Flat Top Specialist
Bluegrass picker Roy Curry took this month’s Homegrown CD award with
his feisty recording Flat Top Specialist. Having won the Winfield
Flatpicking Championship twice (in 1980 and 1991), Curry is no stranger
to the guitar. "I’d always played a lot, but I never recorded a
tape or a CD or anything," he says. Taking the truly homegrown
approach, Curry completed the whole recording process on a four-track
minidisk in his spare bedroom.
Flat Top Specialist got its name from a sign at a local barbershop
Curry passed every day on his way to work. He borrowed the sign to shoot
the photo that ended up on the CD’s cover. The recording includes about
a dozen cuts, many of them bluegrass standards arranged by Curry. He’s
also added a couple of his own pieces to the mix: "Old Hogan’s
Goat," a medium-tempo tune in G position with a capo on the second
fret, and "Old Dominion," a more up-tempo piece that shows
off the picking that earned Curry top honors at Winfield. Curry played
all the guitar and bass tracks on the recording and added some banjo
as well. He was joined by Carl Jones, Dave Summers, and Bobby Burns
on mandolin, and Marty Lanham (who also built Curry's guitar) on banjo.
Curry had long admired Lanham’s guitars (built under the Nashville
Guitar Co. moniker) but couldn’t afford one. "I wish you’d give
away one of these at Winfield so I could go out there and win it,"
he said to Lanham jokingly. Lanham mentioned that he was building a
guitar for a contest in Missouri, so Curry went to Missouri, won the
contest, and got the guitar. It’s built of kingwood, a rare cousin of
Brazilian rosewood that grows on the island of Madagascar.
Curry got into bluegrass at the age of 11 after hearing a neighbor
picking the banjo on the porch of his Ohio home. He spent hours hunched
over his record player listening to Doc Watson. After graduating from
high school, he began traveling to all the fiddle competitions, where
he began winning awards for his guitar playing. In the mid-’80s, he
made a foray into country music as guitarist for the Forester Sisters,
but he’s now rediscovered his bluegrass roots with his Chattanooga,
Tennessee–based ensemble the Lone Mountain Band. "I have more fun
with this band than I’ve ever had with any sort of band," says
Curry. "We play around one microphone, and it’s a hoot." Curry
is currently working on a recording with the Lone Mountain Band as well
as another solo album.
Everything on Flat Top Specialist was multitracked on a four-track
Yamaha MD-4 minidisk recorder. The lead parts are placed out front so
you can hear the nuances of his picking, but the backing tracks are
all quite audible and surprisingly well mixed for such a low-fi unit.
Curry started by recording either the bass or rhythm guitar to a click
track. Then he added the other rhythm instrument and combined the two
on one track. "That left me three empty ones, so I had enough room
for guitar, banjo, and mandolin," he explains. It was all captured
with a CAD E-100 medium-sized condenser microphone and run through a
Mackie 1202 mixer into the four-track. The only exception is "Soldier’s
Joy," which was recorded with a Shure ND 757 microphone and the
CAD in stereo. Curry plays in a chair and positions the microphone 18
to 20 inches above the guitar, pointing down at the pickguard just below
the soundhole. "I sat there with a microphone for quite a few hours
trying to find a good spot," he recalls.
Once everything was recorded, he took the four direct outs from the
minidisk and ran them back into the Mackie, mixing the whole album on
the fly. "I left the bass and rhythm guitar pretty much at normal
levels and mixed the lead instruments as they played onto another minidisk,"
he explains. The second minidisk player was a basic consumer model he
used solely to record the stereo mix. He ran the signal through an Alesis
Microverb and an Alesis Stereo EQ. No other mixing or mastering was
done. "I just listened to it until it started sounding pretty good,"
he says. "I mixed all the tunes in one afternoon. Then I erased
them." The third attempt turned out to be the keeper.
The CD was duplicated by Crystal Color Graphics in Hixson, Tennessee,
and Curry himself provided them with several photos and a self-designed
layout for the packaging. Copies of the CD can be purchased through
the mail (Roy Curry, PO Box 15163, Chattanooga, TN 37415) or through
County Sales in Floyd, Virginia (www.countysales.com).
Curry plans to use his $1,000 prize from Sweetwater Sound to upgrade
his recording setup from minidisk to ADAT.
–Andrew DuBrock
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,
December 2000, No.96.
Check out the other
winners online.
