Working on the Thunder’s Mouth CD
In 2008, I was mixing my fifth solo CD, Thunder's Mouth, with Corin Nelson at Will Ackerman's Imaginary Road Studio up in Dummerston VT.
Will was surfing in Mexico, and I could mix at the studio with Corin for a bit less per hour than usual. We were plowing through a song, when I realized that I'd left a hard drive with some important overdubs behind in my attic studio in Brattleboro.
I called my wife to see if she could bring me the drive and save us a lost hour–the 25-minute drive back and forth. Barb said she could and would. I described the drive. She laid her hands on it, and I hung up. We went back to work.
Barb arrived and we quickly copied the relevant contents of the external drive into the system. Barb asked, "What are you working on?"
We were working on a really fat mix–sorting multiple takes of Eugene Friesen's remarkable cello playing, T-Bone Wolk's multiple contributions, and Sam Broussard's electric guitar–sculpting the final track out of an incredibly rich palette of sounds.
We cued it up and sat Barb in the sweet spot while we stood back and listened.
As the track played, I grabbed a pad, noted the time code, and started to make notes about things I wanted to fix. Corin did the same. When the track came to a close, Barb said, "That sounds amazing."
Corin said, "What've you got?"
"Around 45 seconds in there's a guitar hit that's out of time."
Corin: "I've got that, too. Let's go fix it."
We auditioned the track and identified the hit that was out of time and isolated it.
"Which way?" Corin asked.
I pointed toward the head of the tune and Corin hit a 'nudge' arrow in the mixing program. We listened again. Fine. He healed up the borders.
Corin said, "Great. What else?"
And Barb said, "Wait a minute."
"I didn't hear that there was a problem and I didn't hear that it was 'fixed.' How far did you move it?"
"Corin, how far did we move that?"
Corin examined the preset nudge values we'd been working with:
"One ten-thousandth of a second."
Barb looked at us like we were crazy.
But wait: it had stuck out of the mix and we'd both heard that it was 'wrong'–attracting attention to itself–and we'd both heard when it was 'fixed' and had settled back into the track.
Still, like Barb, I have to admit I was a little surprised at the smallness of the adjustment we'd made. I was grateful for Barb's question. It taught me something.
We are not civilians. When we are listening to music, or playing it, we are monitoring time in minute, barely perceptible increments of time. We are living in the very smallest denomination of the present moment. And when we miss our marks, we hear it, we know it, and we adjust.
Music requires physical training, emotional, intellectual, and sensory attention and seems to unite nearly all the functions of the human brain in a time-based feedback loop that would seem quite impossible to coordinate. And yet, we do.
We are forced into a present moment so very small, that there is almost no room for anything but our pure attention.
And, in my experience, that is what saves us.
All the old Blues heads I knew said, "When you really feel bad, play it slow. The slower, the better."
Consolidating one's attention, looking outside oneself, turning your gaze away from the pain–in itself–is a gift of immense proportions. Our ability to look away may provide us with just enough space and saving grace for us to go on, to live, to find our way forward, and to love again.
There have been times when I cursed myself for playing music of heartbreak, betrayal, and abandonment. ("Why couldn't you play Renaissance music? Or penny whistle?")
But, by saving room for the shadow and providing a way to engage with it–somehow being at once both inside and outside of the darkness, as painful as it was some days (and nights)–I know it saved me as it saved or tried to save generations of African Americans.
The arts are often seen characterized in modern society as a bauble to be worn on the wrists of the rich.
For the rich, they are a luxury.
For the rest of us, they are a survival mechanism.
I do not play for money, I play to survive. I can confidently say that no one picked up an instrument planning to get rich. They picked them because they had to. They picked them up to survive.
We pick them up to survive.
Scott Ainslie
April 10, 2024
Brattleboro, Vermont
https://ScottAinslie.Substack.com
https://Patreon.com/ScottAinslie
https://CattailMusic.com
Why we play? Your answer applies to some of us, anyway.
Regarding autotuning and nudging, that’s why live music has made such a comeback. That’s why people still listen to “Louie, Louie” and to maybe the most out of tune harmony vocals ever recorded in The Beau Brummels’ “Laugh, Laugh”.
No such thing as perfection.