This month’s winning Homegrown CD features excellent production values
and a virtuosic approach to original acoustic jazz. Jack West and Curvature
(Jack West on eight-string guitar, Dean Magraw on six-string, Joel Davel
on marimba, and Peter Valsamis on drums) create a groove and a forum
for improvisation rarely found in acoustic music. West released the
CD on his own label, Ahead Behind, and achieved excellent results using
basic equipment, creative problem solving, and the help of a few friends.
He plays bass lines and regular guitar parts simultaneously, making
good use of the extended range of his eight-string flattop, which was
custom-built by Jeff Traugott. His technique brings to mind the work
of fellow (electric) eight-stringer Charlie Hunter. In fact, late saxophonist
Calder Spanier, a past member of Hunter’s band, also played with Curvature
for some time.
West used to play a standard guitar, but, as he explains, "When I played
six-string, I ended up with something like 20 different tunings and
I started thinking that if I just had another string I wouldn’t have
to retune so much. Being able to play Charlie’s [eight-string] guitar
convinced me that it was playable, and I also heard some of Lenny Breau’s
stuff, where he’s using the high A on his seven-string." Although West
still relies on a variety of tunings, his most common is now standard
with added high and low A strings.
As We Know It is the third Curvature album produced in West’s
home studio, located in his two-bedroom flat in Oakland, California.
The studio is based around a pair of original "blackface" Alesis ADATs
and a Yamaha Pro Mix 01 mixer, which gives West 16 tracks of digital
recording. West wanted to capture the band playing live, rather than
recording basic tracks and having the individual musicians overdub their
parts, so he had to figure out how to separate the sources. Partially
inspired by renowned Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Mike Marshall’s
article on home recording in Acoustic Guitar ("Bringing It All
Back Home," March 1996), West and the session’s engineer Paul
Scriver decided to place each of the quartet’s musicians in a separate
room connected to the others by microphones and headphones. Dean Magraw
was flown in for the session, which had to be completed in three days,
and the lack of preparation combined with an inability to rely on visual
cues made it difficult to record the album live. "I had sent Dean some
rough tapes and some charts I had written out in Finale," recalls West,
who also arranged a local gig the night before the first session to
warm the band up.
With the drums set up in the living room ("You need a large room to
make them sound good," says West), the marimba in the control room,
and Magraw in the bedroom, West retreated into a tiny corner next to
his laundry room. In order to achieve maximum isolation, West used large
pieces of cardboard in the doorways between the rooms, creating double
panes that successfully kept bleed between tracks to a minimum.
West’s eight-string was miked with a Neumann KM 84 at the fingerboard
and an AKG 414 placed close to the body. Because it’s difficult to accurately
reproduce the instrument’s extended low range with mics alone, West
also used the signal from a Fishman Rare Earth Humbucker pickup, run
through a Tech 21 SansAmp Acoustic preamp and recorded to a separate
track. "It’s EQ’d with pretty much all the mids and highs rolled off,
so it’s really just bass," says West, who adds that this technique helped
establish the guitar’s presence in the overall sound. Magraw’s Martin
D-16 was miked with another KM 84, as well as with a custom-made, omnidirectional,
large-diaphragm condenser microphone made by Scott Morrison ([805] 462-8380,
dagmarscott@hotmail.com
]. Two AKG C460 overhead mics and one AKG E35EV captured the sound of
the marimba, and a variety of strategically placed overheads as well
as several closer mics told six or seven ADAT tracks what the drums
sounded like.
As We Know It was mixed the old-fashioned way, by manually controlling
the board while recording the results to a Tascam DA30 mk II DAT machine
and monitoring through ADS M1 hi-fi speakers. A BBE 862 Sonic Maximizer
was used on the kick drum, and a few of the Yamaha board’s built-in
reverbs were used as effects. West estimates that he probably worked
on mixing the album for about a month, making frequent use of the Pro
01’s ability to store "scenes" (settings). Although he achieved excellent
results, West says that he’d most likely hire a professional engineer
for the job in the future. "As you get better at hearing the music,
you realize that there’s all this stuff that you have to do during the
mix," he explains. "If you don’t do it every day, like a good engineer
does, you don’t have the chops. You’re hearing what needs to be done,
but it takes you an hour to do it, instead of five minutes."
For mastering, the DAT mix was transferred to a Macintosh G3 using
a Mark of the Unicorn 2408 interface and software. In keeping with the
philosophy of a live recording, very little editing was done in this
process, but compression added to some of the peaks gave the finished
product a polished sound. The album’s artwork was a collaborative effort
by West, his girlfriend Christina Manansala, and a couple of photographer
friends, Ken Gosset and Steve Fish. West printed an initial run of 500
copies of As We Know It, which he intends to sell at gigs and
on his Web site, www.aheadbehind.com
.
As We Know It caught the attention of producer Lee Townsend,
whose credits include work with guitarists Bill Frisell, John Scofield,
and Dusan Bogdanovic. "I had his phone number from a friend, and I called
him up to see if he might be able to recommend a producer for me," West
explains. "I didn’t think he’d be interested himself. He called me back
and said, ‘I’ve been listening to your records, and I think you’re ready
to take this to the next level.’" The results of Townsend’s production
skills will soon be heard on Curvature’s next release, Big Ideas,
which was recently recorded at San Francisco’s Mobius studio. It features
Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter, Tony Furtado) on drums, Mark Summer
(Turtle Island String Quartet) on cello, and Joel Davel on marimbas.
West plans to release the album on his own label in January before shopping
it around to some of the majors.
West is already thinking about his next project, which he plans to
record in his modest home studio. He is planning on spending his $1,000
prize certificate from Sweetwater Sound on either a microphone or a
recording card for his Macintosh.
––Teja Gerken
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,
February 2001, No.98.
Check out the other
winners online.
