Week 3 - Tuesday 3/26/1991

Recording Mr. Einstein and Mr. Brown.

Gates recorded vocals for Einstein. Wallace and Winegar likened the experience to "pulling teeth". Take 2, essentially a warm-up for Gates, was very good. Gates disliked what he heard on playback and concentrated on recording take after take of real performances, though none of them had the exciting quality of Take 2. We convinced him to perform punch-ins on Take 2 instead, which he did reluctantly.

Winegar and I added a four-handed Mellotron part as Adam dictated the melodies to be played during the song's outro. At one point, Winegar misunderstood Wallace's shouted instructions and doubled the guitar solo on the Mellotron. We all loved the results - a happy accident.

At 3:00 P.M., we turned our attention to Mr. Brown. The song's long, repetitious outro needed lots of sounds to sustain interest. Our first task was to wipe a track of silly vocal noises we had recorded the previous week and replace them with sampled Indian music and some recorded dialog from a Jean Cocteau film.

Puig loaded the 2" tape for Mr. Brown's vocals onto the machine and Gates re-recorded his vocal parts for the song's choruses. Hoping to avoid a repeat of the previous Friday's disasterous vocal session, Wallace had Gates track all of the vocals for a single chorus, which he then mixed down and sampled. Winegar manually triggered the sample to drop it into the song's other choruses.