Chicago Bass Ensemble

The silence on this subject might have told you all you needed to know. We’ve decided to postpone our recording of Sawtooth Hammer and The Open Sea until sometime in 2011. We just couldn’t get the pieces ready to the point where they felt like we were truly expressing them musically. We were still struggling with technical aspects of the pieces.

As leader of the group, I’m doing a little soul-searching and post-mortem analysis of why we weren’t able to pull this off.

Oh well, on to 2011!

Here’s an update of our progress toward recording Sawtooth Hammer and The Open Sea.

For our last three rehearsals, we’ve been diligent about recording takes of each piece, and then using the time between rehearsals to listen, analyze and improve our performances. In last night’s rehearsal, we listened to each recording we made, during the rehearsal. What a great tool for finding, discussing and fixing problems.

We made great progress last night. But the four of us agreed that we weren’t quite ready to lay these tracks down in a permanent way yet. There are still some rough edges, and some places where the tempi sag just a bit.

We are also learning a bit more about each piece as we work in this focused way. For instance, even though we’ve been performing Sawtooth Hammer for some time (two years?) we are still uncovering what drives it motivically. I’m also giving thought to how these pieces should be placed in the stereo field.

Next steps? Find a new date for recording–I’m still hopeful to finish this before the end of the year. And practice, practice, practice!

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Great news to report this week. I hope you’re both still reading.

We’ve all but finalized our rehearsal schedule leading up to recording. If all goes well, we will spend three hours on December 6 recording Seth Boustead’s Sawtooth Hammer and The Open Sea by our own Doug Johnson. Hudson Fair, Ealing Mobile Recording’s Tonmeister and Grammy-award winning recordist will work with us. (Plaxo, LinkedIn)

As a group, we had a meeting to discuss some details. You never know if we’ll hit it big in one shot (it doesn’t hurt to dream!), so I wanted to air some things. I refer to them briefly here, in case others can learn from my experience.

• We’re comfortable going without a producer, this time around. Hudson has great ears, so I think we can trust his judgement. And bringing another person, in some sense a fifth member of the quartet at this point feels like an extra burden of explanation and learning–sort of the “mythical man month” concept–just when the clock is ticking most furiously.
• The rest of the group is willing to get paid after I’ve made back my expenses from the recording, rather than taking an upfront “buyout” payment for the recording session. Let me explain some thinking about this:
  • Hudson gets paid no matter how these recording sell. Is it fair that the musicians, who will have put in much more time get nothing? I didn’t think so either, so I made sure to offer a “buyout” payment.
  • Doug, Michael and John are my friends as well as members of the group, so I don’t mind sharing the profits, whether they are large or small.
  • I work a full-time day job, so I have the luxury of not worrying whether profits and shares of them are large or small.
  • Some of this might be somewhat unconventional, but I think it will work out. Hopefully the union won’t bust my chops. I support my union, I believe in the ideal of what it does, but I don’t have the scratch to pay scale for this. When we make it huge, noone will mind that the first couple of recording sessions were done in this way. Anyway, as a group we’re in this together; I’m not the Man trying to cheat the rest of the guys.
• Using my Zoom H4, I’ll record at least one take of each piece at all of our upcoming rehearsals, and share them with the guys so they can analyze them in between rehearsals. I hope we can maximize our progress in polishing these pieces up by doing that.

Stay tuned for more news, and keep those thousands of comments rolling in!

Jacque Harper