SamuelBLupowitz

"The smooth grooves of this song alone will make it to at least #2!"

I've got some learning to do at your feet, I think, my friend!

Thanks for the share. I started gently incorporating accordion into my arsenal late last year, and I've been having a blast getting to know it. Don't expect to be able to play like this guy anytime soon, but it's nice to have a new axe to explore, and a new color in my musical palette. It's such a complicated machine, but you can cover a lot of ground even without touching the bass button side (unless you're the guy in this video and just play one of those accordions with buttons on BOTH sides... wow).

You are thinking of the great Ray Cooper, who shakes a tambourine and whacks the congas with more intensity than I've maybe ever seen from a human being. Their duo shows are inspirational -- the perfect blend of the intimacy of Elton's solo performance and the fire he gets when another player is egging him on.

Thrilled and honored to have introduced you to some music you dig! That's one of my favorite tracks on that record -- I think it owes a debt to Steely Dan (the guitar part and talkbox make me think Haitian Divorce; the piano solo really feels like a nod to Sign In Stranger). But Theo still has a unique voice as a performer and songwriter that I'm happy to hear that you appreciate!

This falls outside the "blues" arena the majority of the time, I'd say, but my dear friend, let me introduce you to The Dresden Dolls.

I've learned over years of recording that sometimes I have to trust other people's ears, who hear what is, over my own, which often hear what I call "the space between what I heard in my head and what I actually played." A couple of weeks ago I played a keyboard solo live during the tracking session for a singer/songwriter project. I didn't think it was my best work ever, but l was cool with it if they were (it's their record, right?). In my mind, there was one note that just sounded plain WRONG -- I think I heard the fifth and played the sixth or something like that, very different effect on the melodic line. But the songwriters and producer/engineer loved that moment in particular! I've gotten a sense how to pick my battles, I guess. I'll push harder to fix stuff I don't like in my playing if it's *my* record, but I think it's paramount to have collaborators you trust around so that you're not plagued by those little moments, whether you decide to try again, or decide that the part works. But every now and then I'll hear an old track and cringe anyway... Hey, doesn't the story go that Keith Emerson HATED the Lucky Man solo, that it was a first take and he was just messing around? So, you never know what's going to connect with people once it leaves you.

I've been a bass player since I was 12, and since growing up everybody (jazz band, rock bands, pit orchestras, you name it) needed a bassist, I've logged a lot of hours on the instrument. I know how to get My Sound (and tailor it to the gig when necessary). So, in the studio, I do enjoy trying different amps and DIs and plugins for flavor (that one studio that had an old Ampeg flip-top, mmmm mmmm mmmm). But I've realized that when it comes to recording bass, on my end, the less I get in the way of the sound of my hands on the instrument, the happier I am. I've gone direct into an interface with my J-bass strung with LaBella flats and felt like the sound is 90% there. It's special when that happens. Depending on the arrangement, of course, I have to treat bass differently, but generally I just cut a bunch where the fundamental of the kick drum sits, boost a bit where the bass seems to have the most punch (with my playing, again, arrangement dependent, this tends to be around 110-120 Hz), a little compression to even it out, and voila. Of course, there's always That Track where I have to fight to get it to sit right. C'est la vie...

Going to update the thread with today's new single/video release -- very different setup in the same space, and some really wicked overdriven and delay-manipulated Wurlitzer.

I had this same experience with a rehearsal space's CP4, nearly ten years ago now. I was so excited to get to play the well-regarded Yamaha DP (the same one Chuck Leavell uses with the Stones!), and I was deeply disappointed by what I felt like was an extremely heavy action and a sound that wouldn't cut through a mix at all. I felt like I was working twice as hard for half the presence I was used to with the Casio Privia I gigged with at the time. My band rehearsed in that space for about a year, and I never got comfortable with that board. I'm sure the poor amplification (the much-derided Roland KC amp) didn't help, and it was a rented rehearsal room often used by children and teens, so who knows what had been done to that CP4. I know it had some weirdness on the digital side of things (it would default to a weird transposition setting, like a minor third down from A440 or something), so I'm wondering if that contributed somehow. Maybe some saved EQ setting, or output issues, not sure. But the CP88 I purchased in 2021 has been much kinder to my fingers, even if getting a digital to cut through a mix in a way that "feels" like an acoustic piano is still a mix of art and science. I tend to instinctively play more aggressively to compensate for 1) being drowned out by drums and 2) to get the physical response of hammers striking strings and making the body resonate -- and no amount of heavier playing can bring that out on a digital! So I just try to make sure I give myself plenty of headroom for piano in the monitors, and get myself louder than I think I need to in my mix, so I can play more dynamically. And for what it's worth, I set the action response on my CP88 to the lighter setting.

To contrast my last comment: When I was making my solo album during the pandemic, I waited to lay down the piano part for one of the ballads until *immediately* after the piano tuner was finished with my spinet. And even then, every take I did, I could hear the piano going further out of tune as I played. I had to nail it in two or three passes or the edits would have been too obvious, and the tuning would have gone outside the realm of "pleasant chorusing" into "distracting." Not as much of an issue for the more upbeat/aggressive tunes, but for a sensitive, emotional ballad ... stressful!

That's so funny -- my spinet in my home studio is a mess, incredibly difficult to keep in tune, hardly worth the $75 we paid for it. But I love how fast and breezy the action is, and the bright punch of the sound of the piano when it responds. Makes my blues licks feel like butter. I'd still prefer a Yamaha baby grand in my house, but sometimes I wish I could have my spinet's action on a DP. 100%. I love my Yamaha CP88 (thanks, @Outkaster!), and I actually enjoy playing (digital) piano at gigs for the first time in a long time. But if I could have an acoustic piano, even a spinet, rolled out for me every time I play a crummy club gig or whatever, I would do it every time. It's the feeling of a big block of wood resonating, the feeling of the mechanisms moving when you lean on the pedals, that the digitals can't do. They sound and feel amazing at this point, but even the best reproduce the sound of the resonance without the physical sensation.

A true music legend of the 20th century (and beyond). Here's my favorite performance of one of his tunes:

The dreaded "playing live music in a venue that isn't primarily intended for music" gig only gets worse when the staff tries (or is ordered) to "help." I'm glad at least they have a real piano for you to play. When it's your personal gear they start messing with ... hoo boy. Plus, if you have to bring your own gear and amplification, nine times out of ten there is an absolutely nightmarish power outlet situation. "We're going to tape this frayed extension cord down here so the servers don't trip on it going in and out of the kitchen right next to where you're set up! You can run all your gear out of these two outlets, right?"

Yikes, I've been using the XLR outs on my CP88 all this time. It never occurred to me that this could be a problem. If anyone finds out more from the Yamaha forum, let me know, but otherwise, I think I'll be making some changes in my habits (like asking for a DI regardless).

That's sort of Mehldau's MO. He's been reinterpreting rock tunes as "standards" for his whole career. I hadn't heard the aforementioned Tom Sawyer and had to check it out. A little bit of a different beast from his solo/trio takes on Radiohead, to be sure... I understand why the arrangement would be divisive, but it is a big ol' journey to hear Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile (!) just totally have their way with the tune.

Saw this clip of Mehldau discussing and performing his arrangement of "I Am the Walrus." Took my breath away. His sensitivity and ability to build intensity while playing lightly is really something to behold. He's one of my favorite players, to be sure, though I can't say I'm anywhere near his neighborhood when it comes to technique and harmonic vocabulary.

This is an oldie that remains one of my favorites, because I can clearly remember my middle school band director (a grown adult man) telling it to our two oboeists (two 13 year old boys). You can substitute the hated instrument of your choice. How do you get two oboeists to play in tune? Shoot one.

What a beautiful space to make some music! I'll check your video out for sure. The three live rhythm section tracks I did for my solo album had my little spinet similarly close to the drums. We got a great balance but it was trickier to mix, for sure. I remember reading that when recording The Stranger, Phil Ramone tried a bunch of different ways to keep the drums out of the piano, until ultimately deciding that that was part of the sound and working the mix around the drum bleed. Gus Dudgeon, on the other hand, apparently built an enormous "silo" around Elton John's piano that went from the soundboard up to the ceiling, so they could put mics in there and keep the bleed of the band's instruments out. Listen, I'd take the sound of any of those 70s records. But the thing that always gets me as far as defeating the bleed is the vocal. Not just keeping the drums to a minimum in a vocal mic, but singers who can nail a tune in one take like that never cease to amaze me. If I'm the singer on a track and I'm doing a live scratch, it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to replace it later when I'm not multitasking.

You know, I remember @Dave Brycetalking about outdoor recording awhile back when the Peter Jackson "Get Back" film was released. If you'll forgive my clunky paraphrase, dB, the takeaway was something like "we spend all this money on gear, and treating our space, and getting everything just right, and then you watch how they make a record live on a roof in London, with two mics on the drums and those weird little vocal mics..." I know some of you have said "I don't care how they make the record as long as I enjoy the end result," but I find the process of making a compelling recording just as interesting as the recording itself, so I eat this stuff up.

In case anyone else was interested in the process as much as I was, I went to that fountain of accurate information, Instagram, for answers... 😉 Looks like I was wrong about the vocal mic, it is a condenser, not a ribbon; there's a stereo ribbon *behind* the piano picking that up. Makes a little more sense to me! Still such sensitive playing by the ensemble. Glad y'all enjoyed! Theo's last album, Modern Johnny Sings: Songs in the Age of Vibe, was my most-played of 2020, and Lee Pardini's piano playing on that record is out of this world and sent me DEEP down a rabbit hole that led to my obsession with Lee's main band, Dawes. The guy playing on this newer record seems like he can hang, too.

There are definitely overdubs (background/double-tracked vocals at the end, and the Leslie doesn't appear to be going during tracking, so it's either an overdub or a reamp of the dry part he's playing on the synth). I'm not 100% sure it's a ribbon mic but it looked like it to me, and the balance between the (mono, center) piano and the lead vocal is such that I'd be willing to put some money on the figure-8 pattern making that happen. So I'm curious exactly what the correlation between what we see and hear is. But the audio/video sync between the lead vocal, the piano, and the other players when the camera is on them is SO exact that I'm pretty sure we're largely seeing what we're hearing. I imagine we'll be seeing more in-studio videos from these sessions if that's the case. He did something similar with his last record, but there were iso booths and headphones involved. And of course, Vulfpeck does this stuff all the time, but those tend to be more about capturing a fun performance than crafting a clean singer-songwriter track. Tl;dr I think other than a few overdubs we really are hearing what was happening in the room while the cameras rolled. It's in keeping for Theo and his crew, but this is, I think, another level of it for him.

That’s what I thought at first, but the piano that takes over in verse 2 is the Wurlitzer. And the Wurlitzer drops out when the keyboard player hits the “organ” parts on the synth. I think it’s a testament to how carefully crafted the arrangement is!

Ultimately I don’t care either, which is what makes the subtle middle finger at a more typical, isolation-based recording process so jaw-dropping. Just making sure it’s clear that my “outrage” is just based on the sheer skill involved to make this track happen under the circumstances.