Meredith Bragg & The Terminals

Studio Diary: April 11-15
Inner Ear Studio, Arlington VA


From left to right: Meredith, Jon, Brian, Elizabeth.

DAY ONE: Monday, April 11 (Live tracking)
DAY TWO: Tuesday, April 12 (Live tracking)
DAY THREE: Wednesday, April 13 (Vocal tracking & overdubs)
DAY FOUR: Thursday, April 14 (Mixing)
DAY FIVE: Friday, April 15 (Mixing)

Afterword: Some disjointed thoughts about art and friendship and cocaine.

The Project: Meredith Bragg & The Terminals are recording four or five songs (depending on how fast we work) for an EP. Meredith is leaving soon for a year-long trip with his wife, Elizabeth is joining the Peace Corps, and Brian (me) lives in Brooklyn, and increasingly complains about driving to DC for shows and rehearsals, so we wanted to record some of our recent songs before this incarnation of the band is no more.

The Studio: We're recording all week at Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia, where some of my all-time favorite bands have made some of their all-time best records (Dismemberment Plan, Fugazi, Braid, Maritime, The Promise Ring, Jawbox, etc.). Jon, Meredith and I have been here before: we were in a band called Speedwell several years ago, and recorded an EP at Inner Ear. (As Speedwell, we missed the mall-emo craze of the last few years, and were too earnest to appeal to the hipster synth-rock crowd, so our star was destined to fade away.)

The Players: Meredith Bragg writes the songs, sings the songs, plays guitar, has lots of big ideas, and frets endlessly about pointless things. Jon Roth plays the drums and has recently stopped smoking cigarettes, so he might be a little jittery. Elizabeth Olson plays the cello and deals with our occasional bad ideas and frequent stupid jokes with enviable poise. I (Brian Minter) play piano, organ and bass guitar, with varying degrees of technical competence. Chad Clark and TJ Lipple are going to record all the music on a computer, and rein us in when we get carried away, bogged down, or out of tune. Mike and Douglas at Kora Records are footing part the bill, and will eventually, one hopes, cause the EP to be available in the better sort of record stores everywhere.

The Music: We have five songs in mind, four originals and a cover of a songs by the band 'Songs:Ohia'. Three of the originals are new, and one is an older one that Meredith and Jon recorded a couple years ago that didn't make it onto the upcoming debut album, which may or may not be called 'Eleven Songs'. I'm not really sure.

The Great Wellspring of Cadence and Inspiration from Which We Will Draw a Beautiful Series of Words, Beats, Melodies, Harmonies and Carefully Pitched Frequencies: This is a difficult thing to describe, and cannot be linked to on the world wide internet. Fortunately we are professionals.

Brian Minter
Washington DC
April 9, 2005

Monday, April 11th

It is Tuesday morning in Washington DC, and the sun is bright, and the birds are singing in their proudest voices. However, having spent thirteen hours yesterday confined to a series of cave-like rooms playing music, discussing music and listening to other people play and discuss music, I am unable to listen to the birdsong in non-technical terms.

"Hmmm, that reddish bird sounds a little flat. I think he can get a better take of that that. Also, none of the notes coming from these little brown birds over here are really doing it for me. What are those, major sevenths?" And so on.

After the usual interminable drive from Brooklyn and an unncessarily-heated argument with Meredith over the matter of a bass-line, we churned out a lot of the basic tracks with workmanlike ease. We finished drum tracks for four of the five songs, along with a couple bass and keyboard parts, and only broke once, for pizza.

Getting to play cooler instruments than those I own and am able to afford is one of the best things about recording at a nice studio or playing at a nice venue. My current favorite is the Wurlitzer electronic piano at Inner Ear. Every note sounds like popsicles. It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up, as Ferris Bueller would say. One of the keys was sticking, so TJ, our engineer, took the cover off, but that only made look less like a studio piano and more like a space weapon from a 1950s science-fiction movie, which improved my performance in a very small but significant way.

A good portion of Monday was spent recording drums and "getting drum sounds". This is a labor-intensive process where the engineer places anywhere from three to a hundred microphones around the drum set to catch the infinite array of sounds it makes (the snare drum, the bass drum, the various toms, the crash cymbals, the ride cymbal, the hi-hat, the backside of the snare drum, the entire drum kit from above, the entire drum kit from behind, the sound of the drummer shifting in his seat, etc.), and then records a little bit of the drummer playing as loud as he can. Afterwards, everyone goes back to the control room and listens and says insightful things about the drum sound, taking care to use the official descriptive words you use in a studio setting. "That kick drum sounds flabby," you might say. Or, "The snare attack seems muddy" or "the ambient mics aren't picking up the sizzle." After a few passes of this, all the people in the band who aren't the drummer quit feigning interest in this and go off to read magazines or call their girlfriend in the parking lot, while the drummer and engineer repeat the process 400 times.

Yesterday we didn't have to deal with that, but we did have to spend a good chunk of our morning trying to get a drum machine to play what we wanted and then match up with the rest of the song that had already been recorded.

Several times in my celebrated career as a studio musician, I have been faced with the challenge of incorporating a drum machine into a song otherwise filled with actual drums and instruments played by human beings. Whenever this is suggested, everyone shares their opinion that "That will be totally easy to do," and every time, there is, later, a knot of people huddled around a small black box for hours, arguing and pushing buttons and trying to make it match up. It is a brutal, punishing task, and it accounted for much of our morning.

After the drum machine tribulations, Jon and Meredith and I recorded the basic tracks for our fifth song*, which also took a while, because someone was unhappy with each take. Meredith thought his guitar-playing was too "buzzy", Jon thought his hi-hat sound wasn't "rock" enough, TJ thought Jon's hi-hat sound was too "rock", and so on.

I, of course, had no problems, if only because my bass-part for that song (indeed, for almost all of these songs) was simple enough to be idiot-proof. Also, I subscribe to the recording philsophy that tiny human errors and inperfections during a performance give a song an organic, realistic quality. This sounds impressive, like the kind of things people are always going on about in Tape Op magazine, and has the added bonus that, unless I monumentally crap my part up, I can claim that whatever ended up on tape was exactly what I was going for.**

*A note about song titles: Meredith refrains from giving his songs a title until they are finished, recorded and sent away to the people who make the actual CDs. Sometimes he doesn't even title them at all, and they end up with a stupid, random name for the rest of their existence, like "Basment Song Two" and "Song Jon Doesn't Particularly Care For". The current working titles of the four original songs we're recording are: Cat Song, Vacation Song, Cicada Song, and Christmas Song. It is confusing, especially because the Cat Song is about being on vacation.

** In college, I spent a couple years pursuing a minor in music, just so I could use the studio. My lack of compositional expertise, technical proficiency or recording skill were not obstacles, because after I had amassed enough credits in the program my professor just turned me loose (the official term is "independent study"), and he was the kind of totally open-minded and supportive person who accepted the argument that "that sound is exactly what I was going for" regardless of how fuzzy and disjointed I had managed to make $250,000 worth of high-end audio gear sound.

Since I ALWAYS achieved precisely the sound that I was (retroactively) aiming for, he consistently praised my ability to do "interesting" things and gave me straight A's. I think I also had to turn in a couple papers on audio theory, but mostly I just goofed off.

Meredith is up, and rummaging around in the desk where I'm typing, so I think that means we have to go back to the studio now.

Tuesday, April 12th

My original idea to keep a clever running commentary on the process of studio recording has gone right into the dumper, due partly to the fact that I've been surprisingly busy here, but also to the fact that the studio has no internet access. Or, rather it does, but it's hooked up to the one computer where TJ is working. So to hell with it.

Tuesday was another back-breaking day of intense musical creation and audio fatigue, but almost all the tracking is done. Which is the hip way to say that all the actual instruments have been recorded. There's several different rooms at Inner Ear, used for a variety of purposes and filled with a variety of complicated machines, but there's only one room that's actually used for people to be in playing drums and guitars and pianos (the "live" room), and we only had that room reserved for two days, so we had to really put the hammer down.

After we had the drums and bass guitar and acoustic guitar all recorded, we went back and recorded the more sensitive instruments over top of them (cello, piano, and so on). By sensitive, I mean that they need their own microphone and they need to be in a relatively quiet room without guitars and drums playing nearby. Also, they are sensitive in the sense that they are a little more likely to make you seem caring and deep if you play them.

Being the total pro that she is, Elizabeth knocked out her cello parts in just a few hours. She is also something of a perfectionist, and performances that the rest of us found flawlessly beautiful and captivating made her bury her face in her hands and say "Oh no! It's too awful! I have to do it again!". Eventually TJ (who is a fairly soothing influence overall) told her we'd just "fix it all digitally" and she was satisfied. As far as I know, TJ and Chad are opposed to the school of thought that says you may as well fix problems later on the computer, but a little white lie never hurt anyone.

I also knocked out my parts fairly quickly on the piano and the Hammond organ. Although I was happy to take credit for my professionalism, the truth is that Elizabeth plays her insturment with great skill and technical proficiency, and I just write very simple parts that are hard to mess up. (Unlike the fancier studios we have recorded in, Inner Ear did not have a grand piano. Instead they had one of those upright pianos that your great-aunt probably had in the parlor. It's sustain pedal didn't seem to do anything, and the inept piano player relies heavily on sustain to cover his mistakes, so I didn't care for it. The Hammond organ sounded really rockin', however, which more than made up for it.)

I did run into some problems recording a bass part, however, which vexed me, because I like to think of myself as a good bass player. The problem may have been that none of these songs HAVE bass parts, and in my somewhat overconfident manner, I assumed I would just write them all as we went along. This worked okay for most of the songs, which are very simple and soft-sounding, but one of the tracks we're working on is kind of a rocker, and Meredith and TJ sent me back into the live room to do "something more interesting" on the bass. This was to be a telling moment, as nothing interesting came to mind. We ended up all sitting in the control room listening to the song piece by piece, and I played every variation of the notes that came to my mind. We finally settled on something much later, and TJ, in an attempt to be kind, assured me that bass was difficult for people who don't play it very often.

That should be the end of the marathon 14-hour days. Tomorrow Meredith is recording his vocal tracks, which will be no fun at all, since, although he sings beautifully, he is convinced that he does not, and he usually wigs out quite a bit at this stage of the game. I am planning to spend the morning at the zoo.

Wednesday, April 13th

On the one hand, taking a week off from work to record a record is not nearly as rewarding in terms of "being on vacation" as going to the beach, but on the other hand, it's kind of relaxing to not really have a schedule or any obligations other than getting up late, goofing around all morning, and eventually wandering over to the studio to see how things are going. It's not so much a vacation as it is a brief period spent living an entirely different life, a much more bohemian and creative one, although with less time spent checking my email.

We finished all the tracking Tuesday night, so all day Wednesday was vocal recording, which is a painful, labor-intensive venture. Meredith and TJ spent the entire day at Inner Ear, from 1:30 to about 10. Since I wasn't really needed, I just went for a couple of hours in the afternoon and then again at night, and divided my time equally between telling Meredith how awesome everything sounded, telling Meredith how terrible eveything sounded, and attempting to sound knowledgable about all of TJ's outboard studio gear, which I was not. ("Is that a good compressor?" "That's my cell phone charger.")

In the olden days, a singer sang the song over and over until he (or she) got a good take, and that was it. That's still how it works with really good singers, but most people aren't really good singers. Or, rather, since "good" is subjective when it comes to things like this, most people, especially people in indie-rock bands, don't have any training as a singer, so going into the little room with the microphone and nailing every note is a difficult thing.

Instead, the singer records several takes of each song, and then you go through the different takes and select which verse sounds best, or which phrase, or even which word or syllable. This is known as "comping" the vocals, which I believe stands for "compiling", although TJ seemed to prefer "Frankensteining". Meredith in particular is easily dissatisfied with his singing, so getting a finished track he is happy with is a long and arduous process, one I was glad that I had the liberty to walk away from. Much like hot dogs, the end result may be an excellent product, but the making of them is not something you want to see at close range.

What *is* fun is to see the songs take shape and start to sound like songs. For a band, the best approach to have everyone play together at the same time and record everything. That way, even though all the sounds are on their own individual tracks, the indefineable energy of the music is preserved. The dozens of subtle non-verbal cues the band members give one another while they're actually playing in the same room at the same time makes the music sound more focused and organic and so on. We didn't really have the liberty to do that. For one thing, some of the instruments, like the cello and acoustic piano, sound better if they are recorded all alone, since the sounds of drums and what-not would be picked up by the microphone being used to record them. For another thing, you can only play so many instruments at the same time. One, I believe.

So, a couple days ago, each song basically consisted of Jon's drum parts, usually along with a "scratch" track of Meredith playing guitar and singing, which we would all use as a guideline, but later would discard. Then you add all the other stuff slowly, but you get very caught up in the technical aspects of each new element. At this stage, you don't want to think about the big picture, you want everyone concentrated on the small details of their performance on each part, often to an annoying degree. So you wind up thinking about each song as a collection of parts. You listen not to the chorus, but to way the cello line sounds against the piano chords in the chorus, looking for specific places where the instruments sound weird or off-rhythm or out of pitch or whatever.

Then, listening to everything with fresh ears 24 hours later, it is amazing that the collection of seemingly-unrelated parts has become music. You are no longer listening to the guitar chords or Jon's snare fill, but to the music as a single, discrete sound, the way you hear a song coming out of your speakers in the car. It is a forehead-slapping moment, even though it sounds sort of lame to describe it that way.

Tomorrow (Thursday) we start mixing, which is where the songs that just started sounding like songs start sound a lot more like songs. This is usually one of the fun parts. Also, if we find out that we don't like a certain part, that will just be too bad, and we will have to live with it. I was raised to believe that things like that give you character, although no one ever explained why.

Thursday, April 14th

Today was the first day of mixing, which is the fun part where all the music you've recorded gets put together into songs, and you try to figure out which one you want to sell to The OC. So far I'm leaning toward the Cicada song*, but I'm not sure.

* Probably not its real name (see footnote above)

TJ tag-teamed out with Chad Clark, who is the man responsible for many cool records. He has a sort of cult-leader appeal, and he's very fun to work with. On one of the songs Meredith recorded the sound of a wineglass playing a single tone in the key of the song (E minor, if you're keeping track at home), and our idea was to combine that sound with a single organ note to create a low, ominous rumble, sort of an ambient noise just at the threshhold of hearing. Chad took the sound, EQed it up into a big, weird shiny noise and made it a a central part of the song. Meredith made unhappy faces, and I whispered to him that Chad had clearly missed the point, and we would just have to talk him down.

Then we listened to it in the song, and Chad gave us a big speech about art and genius and music and the Beatles and Fugazi, and somehow made it all seem very integral and wise. He has speeches like just ready to go at a moment's notice. Then, somehow, the noise seemed very bold and artistic and we loved it. We're lucky he didn't suggest that we drink poisonous Kool-Aid.

It's uniquely helpful to have someone who's really serious about making cool and interesting music sit down and work with your material and bring things to the surface that you have overlooked or never considered, because you know the song so well, and you know how it's supposed to go. Also, I've been listening to MTV2 while updating this website every morning, and my brain is starting to think that every song is supposed to sound really chunky and shiny and lame, and be performed by serious-faced boys in black sweaters.

Chad's next suggestion was that we end the song with a random audio snippet of Meredith playing a small piece of a new, totally unrelated song while Jon talked about his roommates in the background. This also seemed insane to us at first, but we were starting to warm to the idea after a while. I'm pretty sure he just makes things up as he goes along.

Unfortunately, my afternoon ended badly. I went outside and found Arlington County towing my van away, so I'm not sure how the rest of the mix turned out. One the one hand, I am totally bummed to be stuck with no car, and facing a mountain of fees and red tape to get it back. On the other hand, that's what you get for driving around all the time like an immigrant drug-dealer: out-of-date inspection, expired registration, tags all wrong. It's a wonder they didn't jail me on general principles. At any rate, having spent the morning talking to the cops and the DMV on the phone, I have nothing left to do but return to the studio, although I will have to take the bus, I guess.

Friday, April 15th

Getting my van back from the bureaucratic clutches of Arlington County is going to be harder than I thought, so I will adopt my preferred method for dealing with hardship and setbacks, which is to pretend they do not exist. This causes me more troubles than it solves, in the long run, but what the hell.

Chad continued his practice of suggesting outlandish things. At one point, idly, during a conversation, he took the piano chords from the end of one song, inverted them and dragged them to a random point at the beginning of the song, so that these ghostly noises appear to be burbling up out of the depths just as Meredith's singing starts. Since the sound of a normal piano chord starts big and ends small as the sound dies away, the reverse of this is sort of like someone running in from another room toward you. Also, while the reverse chord was in the correct key (since it had come from the same song), it didn't happen on the beat, since Chad dropped it essentially at random into the song.

After getting used to it, we decided that it was fantastic. Also, TJ, who also plays the vibbes, had added a part to this song yesterday, and somehow the weird reverse piano and the vibes worked together beautifully. Chad gave another of his speeches about accidents and the subconscious and art and beauty and subway trains and the flight of birds and the interconnectedness of all things, and that was that.

Again, there wasn't a lot for me to do at the studio today, especially once the mixing decisions had all been made. Although, in theory, I am there to make these crucial musical decisions along with Meredith, in practice he wields an incontrovertible veto power. Since it's his name on the marquee, I have no problem with this, but it does mean that I tend to be a little less interested as the decisions get smaller and less meaningful.

At any rate, things were finished up by the evening, and I got my own copy of the newly-mixed songs. There were actually six songs on the CD, since there were two different versions of one of the songs. Meredith told me to listen to these two different mixes and see which I liked better, but I couldn't tell them apart, so I just told him I liked the first one, since I could tell that was the one he liked better. This is also part of my job.

Afterword

Written six months later, on a train ride to Vermont.

Before we made this record, I had had my fill of Meredith Bragg & The Terminals. Some of that was due to the usual sorts of tensions and conflicts you get with any creative enterprise, but most of it was due to the fatigue and weariness you get when you live in Brooklyn and commute to DC once a month to practice and play shows. I decided that the week-long recording session for the EP would mark my departure from the band. Since Elizabeth was leaving to join the Peace Corps and Meredith and Cindy were about to sell their house and spend a year traveling aimlessly around, it seemed like a perfect time.

Unfortunately for my plan, the recording of this record turned out to be the rare kind of experience that reminds you why you spend inordinate amounts of time and money and effort playing the kind of music that, if you're lucky, a couple thousand people tops will take any kind of a shine to. Part of it was the fact that, unlike the first record, which took two years to make, and consisted mostly of Jon and I trying to add some kind of texture to Meredith's songs, this record seemed like more of a collaborative effort. some of the chords were my ideas, some of the harmony lines were Elizabeth's, and, in the best instances, the song had no credible single author.

These songs are indelibly Meredith's, of course; the melodies are his, and the melody is what you sing along to in the car. But the best songwriters are at their best when they are supported, pushed and surprised by a small group of musicians they trust. For examples of this dynamic, consider the studio albums of the Talking Heads, the Pixies, Husker Du, the Beatles, the Replacements and all those old classic rock bands from the mid-70's, then compare these works to later solo records by David Byrne, Frank Black, Bob Mould, John Lennon, Paul Westerberg and all those old guys. Which is not to say that 'Uh Oh' isn't cool, but it isn't 'Remain In Light', and that's a fact.

Anyway, so, one of those days Meredith and I were walking back to Inner Ear after lunch, talking excitedly about ideas for arrangements and mixing choices and new songs as yet unwritten, and I realized that it was stupid to stop making music with him and Jon after I had already gone to the trouble of playing with them off and on for eight years. It's hard enough to find people you can get along with and make music with withough starting over from scratch all the time.

Viewed from some angles, my musical career has not been successful. I have not sold millions of records and had models bring me cocaine in a fancy hotel room (popular culture's ideal of rock stardom), nor have I been on the cover of Magnet magazine (indie culture's idea of rock stardom).

But looking back on it, I can't complain. I got to spend a lot of time with my friends, making music and driving around in a van playing shows. At the good shows a bunch of cool people my own age would be into the music I had helped make and would buy a copy of the CD and take us around their city and show us the things that made it interesting to them. At the bad shows, which were more commonplace, no one cared that we were there, and we ended up trying to navigate a strange town in the dead of night, listening to Modest Mouse and arguing about where a diner might be found. Which is also worthwhile, in its own way.

Not to get all reflective and self-referential, but being in a band and playing music is something I love doing, whether anyone else agrees with me or not. It has an air of doomed nobility to it at times, which I enjoy. There's also an element of anti-consumerist purity to it, the idea of creating something for its own sake and bringing it directly to people who might want to hear it without subjecting it to the vagaries and whims of commerce and all those other things that have nothing to do with the real meaning of it. But that's kind of heavy, so I won't get into it. (For a better treatment of this theme, see any magazine interview with Ian MacKaye published in the last five years.)

Anyway, the first record did pretty well (We didn't make the cover of Magent, but we did make it into a short review on the inside. You can sort of see my hand and the edge of my piano in the picture.), so Mike and Douglas at Kora are going to release the EP in a month or so. Meredith picked up the mastered copies last week.