Rick Manwiller...
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Let Go
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new CD by Rick Manwiller...
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Needless to say, my ordeal was much quicker than the Dakota thing, but no less grueling. When I decided to embark on this project, I had 2 songs written, 4 started, and only 2 partially recorded. To make things interesting, I had 4½ weeks to finish the whole thing. Sleep was kept to a minimum, work was attempted every hour of the day, sometimes commencing at 5am following a futile attempt to fall asleep, due to massive ingestions of caffeine during the day.
But it was fun, nonetheless. At the time of inception, I had demo mixes of the songs "Survive Tonight" and "Nasty Li'l Bidness", but knew there was much to be fixed- the vocals had been recorded with my under-$500 studio microphone, and sounded a bit "grainy". Plus several instrumental tracks were sub-par, even for me (I am notoriously less-than-picky at times in the studio... just ask Jerry Hludzik). : )
So there was much to do. But I am proud to announce that I essentially created, from scratch, 7 songs in the span of just over a month. (Making mental note to call The Guiness Book tomorrow.) Not only that, but, unless I miss my guess, I might be looking at some kind of record. This effort was written, recorded, mixed and mastered, and (so far) manufactured entirely at my little cottage in Clarks Summit, PA, thanks to my wonderful new 4-speed Yamaha CD-R unit. (Have I sucked enough corporate ass yet to get an endorsement deal? Probably not...)
For the Tech Heads (The technically-endowed out there may want to read this, but the average Joe would be better served leafing through a GE refrigerator schematic): As I previously mentioned, I made use of some new equipment for this deal. I started out playing in bands back in 1967 at the tender age of 12, sitting behind my brother's drum kit. For the past 15 years or so, I'd been making use of drum machines for my recordings, and doing quite well with it. But I decided for this project, I would at least try to get back to actually playing drums again. Not sitting at a kit for 15 years will do a hell of a job ruining your chops, and I did not have the luxury of practicing 8 hours a day for 3 months to get them back. So I holstered up my trusty Yamaha DD-11 electronic pad kit for the job. Besides the obvious advantages of have a real drum performance, I also knew the stock sounds coming out of my Roland R-8M percussion unit would not do justice to the effort, so I began to assemble a high-quality sample-playback system, using Windows .wav files pulled from Ross Garfield's "The Drum Doctor 2" percussion sample CD. Seeing as how good .wav playback samplers were running in the range of 2-3 thousand dollars, this meant using my PC as the processor. This meant getting a digital i/o card for the computer. This meant getting a larger hard drive (6.4G) to handle the massive storage requirements that digital audio demands. This meant getting Sound Forge audio editing software. This meant getting a good CD-R unit, which meant getting an ultra-wide SCSI 3 interface. All of the above meant getting a faster processor than the Cyrix 200MX I was currently using, so I decided to build a completely new system for audio, constructing it around an AMD-K6 300MMX chip (I neglected to mention that I have a degree in electronics, and I build PC's kind of as a hobby. Anyway...) I found out later that the K6, fast as it is, is not the prime choice for floating-point calculation-intensivity of digital audio, but... as Doris Day sang, "Case o' beer." Eventually it was done, and all the little electrons lived happily ever after, 88,200 of them per second.
The new system was basically a screamer (note: this article circa 1995), and was ready for high-quality audio sampling. I got a shareware copy of Scott Mitchell's Audio Compositor, which lets you assign Windows .wav files to various incoming MIDI notes, and I was all set. Well, almost... after about 6 hours of free tech support from Scott Mitchell I was. The Yamaha kit was easier to play by someone who hadn't held a drumstick in a long time (it's playable by either sticks or hands), and the drum tracks came out quite nice.
As far as multitracking, my main medium for recording is my trusty old Fostex E-16, and very good sounding machine, considering the ½" analog format. As much as I appreciate digital audio for how it's revolutionized editing and mixing, I still prefer even this minimal machine to ADAT, for the little bit of tape saturation warmth it adds to the tracks. But digital audio made the difference with this project- with Sound Forge on the PC, I didn't even touch the DAT recorder, except for backups- I mixed directly into the PC. I even employed a new procedure (for me, anyway) with this project. When encountering a mixing mistake, I didn't stop the PC recording... I simply stopped the multitrack, rewound past where I'd goofed, then resumed the mix, fixing the mistake (hopefully). The gap was then seamlessly spliced in the PC. This saved me tons of time. If time can be measured in tons, that is. Which I think it can.
My executive producer and good friend Ted Brunelle furnished me with a Neumann U-89 for vocals, another friend (Jay Langan) dropped off an old Gibson Hummingbird acoustic and a beautiful Paul Reed Smith electric, and I was set. I must admit I used my old Fender "Mexicaster" for most rhythm and leads, and only picked up the PRS when I needed a ballsier out-all lead tone. I primarily used a Zoom 9150 processor for this project, but on the next one I've promised myself I'll get a Mesa Boogie and get some nicer tones for some things. Hey... you can't have everything... where would you put it?
Well, that's about it for now. I sat down to type this following what I refer to as "session withdrawal"- after 4 weeks of totally bonzai recording, it's difficult to cool down. More to come as I think of it.
