Studio Quest Begins

No more celebrity cheesecake posts -- I promise!

I hope you found my brief foray into celebrity blogging as wildly entertaining as I did. Lots of stupid celebrity seekers found the site. I wonder what they thought when I indirectly insulted them for searching for "Ashley Greene nude photos?" Actually, they probably didn't think much -- most of them saw that there were no nude photos and quickly resumed their quests. Anyway, it was fun, and I hope that the smart people who read this blog regularly (all 17 of you) found it entertaining. I did lose some Twitter followers over it. Oh well. I have no room in my life (or on my blog) for people who don't get my sense of humor.

Like the "Heidi Montag Playboy Pics" and "Ashley Greene nude photos" crowd, I'm on a quest, and that's what I'm going to blog about for the next few weeks. Everybody's looking for something. It's the fundamental human story, the story from which all other stories emerge, the mother of all stories, if you will pardon the cliché.

What I am looking for is a recording studio. This is not as easy as it seems. I have 14 songs that I want to record. They are all related. Only a couple of them have been released as scratch recordings on my podcast. These songs mean a lot to me, and I want to do them right. I want a bass. I want a keyboard. I want to layer about 20 guitar tracks. I want to let the great and good Joe Bird spread his wings and drum like a maniac. I'll play all the other instruments if necessary, but I really need a studio to do this right, a rock studio, preferably one with some old-school analog equipment.

I have undertaken this quest because I listen to the radio a lot these days, and it pisses me off to hear such crap. It's like the early '60s after Buddy Holly died, Jerry Lee Lewis went to jail, and Elvis went in the army -- we have a bunch of creampuff crooners akin to Frankie Avalon and Fabian taking up space that rightfully belongs to ass-kickin' rockers. If I hear one more weak-ass Coldplay song (God, they are so aptly named -- the sanitary, dispassionate, saccharine commercial quality of their music literally makes me cold when it plays) I might just go even crazier than I already am. If I had the studio those clowns work in, the earth would shake, the heavens would open up, and the world would change. Rock radio to me represents everything that is wrong with the music industry and the world -- everybody plays it too safe and too formulaic; the creampuffs rise and the gold sinks.

What the world needs now is a Bob Dylan-type dude who strips it down to songs that mean something and has a weird voice that turns a lot of people off, a mercurial character who plays songs so compelling and different -- yet familiar at a profoundly rootsy level -- that they move you even without the Frankie Avalon/Fabian early-'60s-esque crapola payola commercial polish.

Speaking of which, I need a little bit of that polish. I want to punch the vocals a little bit to make them silky smooth, and I want to use the $5,000 mics. I want a cylindrical vocal isolation booth. Singing in my apartment is stifling because I don't want to annoy my neighbors, and the acoustics and mics are nowhere near up to par. It would be nice to have some other instruments, too, and an engineer since I can't be on the mixing board and the mic simultaneously.

I'll probably do the post-production mixing/mastering myself because the death of dynamic range is a shame. We have the tools to make a friggin' seven-layer cake, and everything gets compressed into an audio pancake. That's the way these guys are trained nowadays. Led Zeppelin could never happen with a modern engineer. They'd end up sounding like Coldplay... well, maybe not that bad, but you get my point.

Anyway, studios are expensive. I'm looking at a cost of at least $14,000 (and probably double that) to do the songs the way I want to do them, and I can't afford that right now. But I'm putting it out there and seeing what comes back. I'm going to go out three nights a week and perform at open mics, coffee shops, subway stations -- anyplace that will have me -- until I connect with someone who can get me into a proper studio under some sort of barter system.

Last night was the first night of Studio Quest. It was a total disaster -- the open mic I went to turned out to be for comedians. I briefly considered getting up there and singing a funny song but chickened out. It wasn't my crowd, and I didn't feel welcome there. Plus, there was a two-drink minimum, and I don't drink. The good news is that tonight can only be better.

I'll let you know how it went.

So begins the Studio Quest.