Week 2 - Tuesday 3/19/1991

Recording Mr. Brown

Wallace surprised us by arriving wearing a baseball cap and removing it to reveal a completely shaven head. Despite the merriment in the control room, Berg was feeling down, as nobody had commented on his keyboard and Tanpura playing from the previous day. We promised to acknowledge his work in the future by offering feedback. Berg's final, sarcastic aside to Urbano was, "They'll probably end up mixing all my keyboard stuff down anyway."

By 10:30 a.m., Berg began tracking Emax II string parts onto the master tape. Wallace suggested waiting until evening to record the Mellotron parts.

The second engineer is Peter and the studio runner is Gregory. At lunchtime, we make choices from a white binder filled with take-out restaurants in Hollywood, after which Gregory fetches the food. The studio offers a bottomless pot of hot coffee and Arrowhead drinking water.

I worked out some keyboard voicings for Berg to play in the sections prior to the verses, which he performed while Wallace manned the tape machine. We found out the hard way that Peter isn't adept at punch-in/punch-out work. Wallace, on the other hand, is an expert. At 12:30, Berg relinquished the keyboards to Winegar for the solo violin parts.

I asked Winegar to play a wah-wah guitar part during the outro of the song as he had done on the demo recording. He wasn't interested in doing this but I managed to convince him that it would enliven the keyboard part that he would be doubling. By 3:00, Winegar had completed this part.

Puig let Winegar stick an SM57 into the guitar cabinet, addressing Winegar's growing resentment at having to wait around while mics were being carefully put into place. Returning to the control room, Puig A/B'd his mic setup against Winegar's for me. In a blind test, I preferred Puig's version. Winegar was fine with Puig's version as well, though he had made his point.

Take 3 captured Winegar screaming nonsense into the guitar pickups such as "the unicorn speaks through me!" From 4:30 to 6:15, Wallace comp'd (combined) the guitar tracks into a single master take. He wondered aloud if it were possible to master the CD track so that it would automatically loop through the outro section of the song indefinitely. Puig said that if such a thing were possible, people would return their CDs to the stores, thinking them defective.

Winegar piled on yet more keyboard parts to double his guitar part, with Gates and Berg helping out. Oddly enough, Wallace overdubbed himself singing some scat vocal lines for the outro, but Winegar and Gates summarily dismissed the results. At 8:00 p.m., Urbano tracked a Tambourine part via an esoteric Schoepps mic whose membrane is grown on a plant.

At day's end, Wallace introduced us to his "cousin" - and she turned out to be a stripper hired by Wallace in honor of Urbano's birthday. While heavy metal rock blasted through the control room monitors, she did her thing. We went out to a trendy Hollywood restaurant afterward to celebrate.