EQ Magazine - August 2008 - (Page 18)

Here I Am Again was happy with the switch. “The sound quality of Pro Tools has gotten to the point where I feel I’m able to get the event I recorded back from the equipment,” he says. “If I front end my rig with the same analog gear I have always used, Pro Tools doesn’t seem to hinder my ability to capture that special sound people attribute to the analog world.” Though the crew settled on using modern technology to track Lay It Down early on in the game, ?uestlove and Green decided to eschew the opportunity to multitrack their way through the album. “Initially, we were going to go in and just jam some stuff out, and then re-do the vocals,” says Nichols. “But Al actually sang the stuff in the room with [?uestlove] and the guys. Everyone was playing together, and I think that had a lot to do with the way the album sounds.” hough jamming on tunes is a tried-and-true method of creating band material, it was a new process for a solo artist like Green, who was used to composing with Willie Mitchell, and then laying his vocals down only after the rest of the tracks had been put to tape. “We brought the Roots approach to Al, which is about doing a bunch of stuff live, and then grabbing source material,” explains Nichols. “It was a bit foreign to Al. He asked, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ I said, ‘Just sing whatever comes to your mind, and we will follow you. You can hum a note or clap your hands.’ It was confusing to him for a while— Green going over his lyric s during a session break. meaning only ten or 15 minutes!” Once he got comfortable Green amazed his comrades with his improvisational abilities. “On the song ‘Lay It Down,’ we kept 60 percent of it freestyle,” relates ?uestlove. “We asked, ‘Do you want a second to write to this?’ But Al said, ‘Nah, I’ve been writing all along.’ I said, ‘Where’s the paper?’ He said, ‘It’s in my head. Just play the song—I got the feelin’.’ We started playing, and I couldn’t even drum to it. You’ll notice I didn’t even start drumming until the last chorus. I couldn’t play because I was jawdroppin’ that he was making up lyrics off the top of his head. I’m not used to people catching on that quick.” Smeltz agrees that the sessions were almost supernatural in their flow. “When a band gets together, writes songs on the spot, and, after four days of rhythm tracks, you have almost 13 songs—well, that’s an incredible accomplishment,” he adds. According to Nichols, recording live also reduced the icon worship factor. “You could think, ‘Hey, I’m in a room with Al Green!’ But you could only do that for a fraction of a second, because you had to be on top of what he was doing. The process also gave him a lot of freedom. At one point, he said, ‘Do you mean if I sing this way, you guys are going to play that way? If I slow down, you are going to slow down?’” T O ?uestlove laying down beats on a minimal kit. f course, playing together in the same room with minimal isolation led to an enormous amount of signal bleed. “There is a lot of bleed on there,” Nichols says. “But I think what gave those old classics their signature sound was a lot of ‘unwanted’ noise introduced into the recording. But it’s not just using old noisy gear that gets that sound. We were using tons of vintage equipment—Neve desks and all—but you could use all the same gear and it would sound really clean if all of the instruments were recorded separately. So we decided to set up all the guys in close proximity to one another in order to capture that old-school vibe. If you soloed the organ track, you would hear Al’s vocal and ?uestlove’s drums and all kinds of things in there. Sometimes, you’d even hear something happening underneath a track that you couldn’t 18 EQ AUGUST 2008 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - August 2008

EQ Magazine - August 2008 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Lyrics Born, Fink, David Kahne on Working with Paul McCartney, What a Future with no Record Industry looks like Tool Box ?uestlove Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Cakewalk Sonar 7 Apple Logic Pro 8 USM Mic Round-Up USB Mics Chameleon Labs 7720 Sounds Room with a Vu

EQ Magazine - August 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.