The Recording

The recording took place in August, 1990. 

Scott:  We seem to have waited until the last possible moment to document ourselves.  Amy's dad had a really decent home studio setup, and he knew how to use it.  Mr. Frishkey was kind enough to spend a day recording us, but also assumed a traditional "producer" type roll.  The recordings themselves were good, but the production ended up having a decidedly mellow and quiet feel to it.  It was not exactly our sound.  I tried to explain to Mr. Frishkey how it should sound, but he was not to be won over.

We had several conversations like this one:

     Me: Can you put distortion on the drums?
     Him:  You already have distortion on the guitar AND bass AND vocals.
     Me: I know. 
     Him:  Well, you can't just put distortion on everything.
     Me: We do.
     Him:  No way.  It won't sound good.

And this one:

     Me:  Can we re-record that last part?  I bumped into the mic on the word "bitch".
     Him:  You don't need to re-do it.  It sounds fine.
     Me:  It sounds bad.  It sounds pretty ugly.
     Him:  It's an ugly word.

This was excellent preparation for those future trips to recording studios where I would really have to stick to my guns with some engineer about basically the exact same things.

The recording itself has a lot of rough spots.  The songs were basically done in one take each.  If you got through your parts with about 80% accuracy, then that was a keeper.

Deron:  Amy's Dad was a blues player and had a great collection of guitars and good recording gear. Unfortunately, he also had me record entirely direct through a preamp. It was the only recording experience I've had where we completed every song before moving on to the next one.

Despite our inexperience and the chasm between his and our idea of sounds, we were really lucky to have someone with the equipment and knowledge to do a real recording. There's no way we could have afforded to pay a real studio and our own efforts would have amounted to one mic into a tape player. I was happily surprised at the sound when re-listening.

  
Amy:  The quality of the recording has stood the test of time, and I will always be grateful for our band benefitting from my dad's generosity and refusal to settle for anything less than hi-fi sound equipment. He had bought a Tascam eight-track reel-to-reel tape recorder  in 1988 and recorded us in August of 1990. His first recordings were of covers and his own songs, and he was eager to test his production skills on others' projects. Luckily for me, he pushed me to contribute vocals and keyboard parts on some of his songs:  embarrassed to be performing in front of him, I held back quite a bit, but it was a necessary first step…if you can perform in front of a parent you butted heads with, you could perform in front of anyone! It was during The Comedian sessions that I discovered a true joy for working in the "studio." As might be expected, it felt like the process forged an even stronger camaraderie between us bandmates than before, even though it was only a month before we took divergent life paths. 

My dad's production style was top-down, with little wiggle room. This was partly personality (believe me!), but it also might have been because he too new at it to go "off book." It inspired me to witness Scott's calm determination when confronted with his sometimes emotive expressions of impatience. Deron's sense of humor helped immensely. I remember feeling really angry that my dad's preference for guitar (as a blues-rock guitarist) resulted in what I felt was a guitar-heavy final mix, but it sounds balanced to me now…funny.
All told, some happy accidents arose in the gap between intention and realization. I remain extremely proud of our demo, and can't thank Scott enough for creating this blog to give the recordings their due.