Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” project file screenshot (click to fullsize)
“Maybe Great Discoveries” is another song that had been around for awhile without ever being satisfactorily recorded. I don’t recall ever trying to play this with an electric band — though it might be interesting to try in a sort of ’80s power ballad arrangement — but the delicacy of the song always seemed to demand a quieter treatment to bring out melody and dynamics. With a live electric band, melody and dynamics are the first things to go out the window, and frankly whether electric or acoustic no one really wants to hear long, slow songs they don’t know in a live setting, so if this one was going to exist in any form it was pretty much slated from the beginning for a studio recording .
Once the proper approach had been determined, recording the basic track was fairly straightforward: so much of the song was dependent on the interaction between the acoustic guitar and the vocals for tempo, dynamics, and rhythm that tracking instruments separately to a click killed it instantly. Without being able to record the guitar and vocal separately, the ability to punch-in and correct vocal problems is more limited, so in my mind the only way to properly represent the song was to capture a ‘live’ performance of the song played all the way through without major errors. Essentially, I needed just the right performance to justify recording the rest of the song.
There are two ways to come at this: first, you sit down and force yourself to play the song over and over until you get it ‘right’ or as close as you can within a certain timeframe; this is the way it’d have to be done in (for example) any record label-funded recording situation, for example. The other way to do it is to just play the song every so often and wait (hope) for the perfect combination of motivation, intoxication, and circumstance to result in an inspired-sounding take, which is what I did here. There were a lot of lousy, draggy, and just plain failed takes along the path, as well as with many that may have sounded more or less okay but suffered a flubbed lyric or missed chord change along the way. Of course, I could have probably fixed up many of these minor flaws and just gone with one of these had it been necessary, but as I was working without a deadline or other time constraint I was willing to wait.
Eventually — I believe I was testing out the MXL990 low-cost condenser mic on vocals while playing the Fender Catalina acoustic guitar — I managed to record a take that upon replay became apparent was the take, capturing a vocal quality head and shoulders above any of the others while remaining almost miraculously error-free. Having captured this take, though, I didn’t really know what to do with it. On early recordings of the song there had been violin accompaniment, but frankly it didn’t add anything other than mirroring the vocal melody in an unnecessary and occasionally obtrusive way. Still, the spare vocal/guitar arrangement seemed overly stark, so back into the box it went…
…to await (as it turned out) the additional inspiration of a keyboard instrument. I’d wanted a musical keyboard for some time, but after a false start buying a friend’s keyboard I’d finally begun hearing the possibilities open to me. I say “false start” because it turned out the second-hand keyboard had a malfunctioning audio output (which my friend legitimately did not know about, having only used the MIDI outs) and sadly the otherwise excellent instrument had to go back to its original owner. However, in the short time that keyboard had been in my possession my imagination had been inflamed: I used it to record “Palette Cleanser” on my first album THIS IS MY REVENGE and I believe the keyboard lines on the title song “This My Revenge” also came from this short timeframe before it had to be returned.
Fortunately not too long after a great deal on Yamaha YPG-635 digital pianos popped up at Guitar Center — well over a hundred dollars cheaper than the closest price, so I assume it had to be some sort of inventory clearing or overstock dump. (This is how I’ve gotten most of my musical equipment: I identify what I really need/want to accomplish my musical goals, I prioritize by importance/availability of funds, and I keep an eye out for deals too good to be passed up — probably well over half of my equipment was clearance/closeout merchandise. Buying the latest and greatest is a sucker’s game.)
Even having the digital piano and its array of wonderful synthesized sounds didn’t solve the problem for me though, as I was not confident my rudimentary keyboard abilities would allow me to perform appropriate embellishment for such a fragile song. Better, I thought, to wait until I’d worked my keyboard abilities up from “appallingly clumsy” at least to “fumbling amateur” before attempting it, so back into the box “Maybe Great Discoveries” went…
…until an April weekend in 2011, when Jeanette Moradi and I were jamming around in the studio — her on piano, me on guitar — and I started playing back bits of various tracks I had in various stages of completion. After the “Maybe Great Discoveries” basic track came on Jeanette immediately keyed into the vocal, asking “What’s that?” — confirming my feeling that its quality would make it the take of the song that would end up being the final version.
After setting up the YPG-635 for recording, I wrote out the chords to the song for Jeanette’s reference, set the the basic guitar & vocal recording playing, and then just let her improvise away for awhile using first a synth string pad patch and then a more traditional piano sound. We were both really getting into the results so we went all out and pulled out Jeanette’s lever harp, which I’d always wanted to use on a track but didn’t want to just force in somewhere as a gimmick. I set up the MXL V67G condenser mic on a boom tripod above and in front of the harp, angled downward toward the instrument’s soundboard. After very little time, it became clear that “Maybe Great Discoveries” was a good fit for the instrument: the percussive, classical timbre of the harp combined perfectly with the synth strings and piano to fill out the sound of the song without steamrollering the vocal the way the violin had. Good stuff!
Above: “Maybe Great Discoveries” version history (click to fullsize)
As the version history above shows, from the point of recording Jeanette’s overdubs all the pieces of the track were basically in place; I did add a couple of additional guitar tracks the next day using the Ovation 2078TC Elite T acoustic, but I eventually ended up pulling them out of the final mix almost entirely as they just ended up getting in the way of the raw original guitar recording. After that, it was mostly a matter of editing and rearranging Jeanette’s improvised accompaniment to sound more ‘composed’ within the contours of the song. It didn’t take long for me to come up with an arrangement I was more than pleased with, particularly given the trouble this song had caused me over the years.
Once it came time to finalize the track for the YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK album it was mostly a matter of slightly tweaking the mix, primarily to remove the majority of the aforementioned guitar overdubs and to pump the keyboard and harp accompaniment higher — but very carefully, as this was the rare track where I felt like we’d really captured something unique and I didn’t want to lose that by overworking the life out of it. Mostly I was just happy to finally put “Maybe Great Discoveries” behind me, content to have realized the song in a form that surpassed my hopes.
To hear the results of our efforts, check out the video for “Maybe Great Discoveries” or hear the album via the links below.
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Buy YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp
Stream YOU HAD TO LEAVE YOUR MARK at Spotify and Bandcamp
