SECOND WIND Recording Notes

Blue Kentucky Wind
Brad - I wrote the chord progression for Blue Kentucky Wind one day while playing my old Martin D-18 in our living room. The song came together quickly, and the title seemed perfect. I played the song around the house for a few weeks, and then finally decided to record it and see just where it was headed.

I recorded a click track and then recorded four takes of the rhythm guitar part (a 1976 Martin D-18), and ended up using three of the tracks, panning one left, one right, and one center. A couple of days later I added the banjo part to the song (my first ever banjo recording), and it too came together quickly. A few days later I added the bass part. I worked hard to create a melodic bass part and avoided using conventional bluegrass bass lines. I ran a quick mix of those parts, made an MP3 of it, and sent it to Dewayne. Dewayne wrote the mandolin melody - a couple of weeks later we recorded the mandolin and we had a song.

I brought in Kyle Dillingham to add the violin parts and he did an incredible job. While recording his tracks on the PC, I also had an Alesis XT-20 ADAT running continuously throughout the session. The ADAT captured everything - the out-takes, warm-ups, conversation between takes - the works. This came in handy when I added the intro to the song a week after the main section of the song was complete, mixed, and "in the can".

I had come up with an acoustic guitar intro for the song and decided to record it and add it to the main section. I recorded the acoustic guitar part and then decided it needed a violin part. I was listening to the ADAT tape of the violin session and spotted a part where Kyle was warming up, prior to the actual violin recording of the song. I edited the violin part so that it would fit with the acoustic guitar intro and it worked out perfectly.

My motive for running the ADAT throughout the session in the first place was based on an evolving belief that some of the best material I hear in the studio - the truly INSPIRED music - is the stuff that happens when "tape isn't rolling". It's those times when a musician (maybe even me) is just messing around and isn't really trying to keep up with or fit into a song, but rather is just playing from the heart. The intro on Blue Kentucky Wind is testimony to that belief.

After completing the acoustic guitar/violin intro I decided to add some wind noises. Think about it - a band called The Mandolin WIND Project, an album called Second WIND, and a song called Blue Kentucky WIND - it was just too much to pass up...

I had originally planned to start the album off with Silver Plume, but with the new wind/violin/acoustic guitar intro in place on Blue Kentucky Wind, I moved that song to the front of the album. It just made sense.

Mockingbird
Brad - Dewayne wrote the basic chord progression and melody for this song. We recorded the rhythm mandolin first (using a click track) and built everything else around that. It was sort of a backwards way of recording, but it worked out nicely. I added the jazz part in the middle of the song for contrast, and we returned to that section for the vamp out. The vamp features several really cool floor tom (drum) parts and some echoey acoustic-electric guitar parts.

The intense crescendo part leading from the bridge back into the third verse is a piano chord played backwards. I played the piano chord and then reversed the track - a 'backwards tape' effect done digitally (I'm so glad I don't have to pull the tape reel off of a tape recorder and turn it around backwards anymore). Mockingbird includes one of my favorite bass parts on the album. I recorded it through a Mesa Boogie Mark IV guitar amp head driving a Peavey cabinet with an 18" Black Widow speaker. The drum parts are a mixture of MIDI programmed parts and 'real' acoustic drums.

Dewayne didn't have a name for the song, but said he wanted a word with three syllables that mimicked the first three notes of the verse melody. I suggested "Mockingbird" and we ran with that. My daughter says that this song reminds her of a movie scene with a sports car driving down a winding mountain road somewhere in Europe.

Silver Plume
Brad - The song title Silver Plume is derived from a colorful historic ghost town in Colorado that was located on the infamous Georgetown Loop Railroad. I first became acquainted with the town of Silver Plume by way of a newspaper article in the Des Moines Sunday Register dated January 7, 1962 - way back when I was a kid. My grandmother saved that article for me (I still have it) and I used to read it over and over again and stare at the black and white photos of those old frontier buildings and imagine all the mysteries and legends they must be hiding. When my family visited relatives in Colorado a couple of years later, we took a trip up to Silver Plume (my grandmother was with us) and I was able to see the town in person. After that, I was REALLY hooked! Enough of the inspiration story...

Silver Plume started off as a chord progression jam. I was playing my Godin Acousticaster guitar through my Fender Acoustasonic SFXII amplifier, and had a chorus and a couple of digital delays hooked up - for you gearheads, the signal chain was, in fact, the Godin Acousticaster guitar into a Boss PQ-4 Parametric EQ into a Boss CE-2 Chorus into a Guyatone MD-3 Micro Delay into a Danelectro PB&J Delay into the Fender Acoustasonic SFXII.

Anyway, the main lick of the song (the opening line that functions as the verse as well) just fell out of the sky. The bridge and chorus followed in suit - in fact, I have a cassette recording of the song during its compositional phase, and that recording is virtually identical to the final recording, except of course, for the lousy recording quality of the cassette recording itself.

The trick of the Silver Plume chord progression is to set the delay times on the delay devices so that one of the delays is in sync with the tempo of the song, and the other delay is set so that it is essentially a quarter-note triplet. Because of the interaction created by the two delays and the guitar part itself, the sound 'rolls over' itself, losing and regaining sync, losing and regaining sync, losing and regaining sync, creating a rhythmic pulse that sounds a lot like a steam locomotive pounding the rails - hence, the song's title. When I play that guitar part I visualize that old narrow gauge engine with its pistons, connecting rods, and valve gears in motion, huffing and puffing, pounding the silver rails as it speeds down the tracks.

Anyway, I presented the demo cassette recording to Dewayne and he wrote the mandolin melody line around the guitar parts. Dewayne has a great ear for melody and this song bears that out. I used a significant amount of long delay-time echo on the mandolin parts in the mix - this rhythmic effect adds to the 'train in motion' effect. Dewayne used his faithful old 1950's Gibson A-40 mandolin.

I wrote the bass guitar part so that it intentionally sounds like an old Western television theme. Dewayne used a brush in his left hand for the snare drum and a regular drum stick in his right hand for the cymbals and tom.

I brought David Short into the studio to play the violin parts because I knew he could capture the wild haunting type effect I was after. I had originally intended to have David use his acoustic violin, but by coincidence that instrument was in the repair shop and he showed up with one of his electric violins. I wasn't thrilled at first but decided to give it a try. It worked out perfectly - the electric violin adds a rough irritating effect to the overall sound which completes the ambience of the shrieking steam locomotive. Yet another example of things working out the way they're supposed to.

I played the acoustic guitar lead parts on my Taylor 314CE. I kept those parts 'close to the script', playing twangy bluegrassy western parts and avoiding the temptation to show off.

Legend Of The Elms
Brad - Legend Of The Elms is named after a screenplay I wrote. As for the song itself, it has its beginning in an old banjo that used to belong to my father. Dad bought a Bacon Belmont 5-string resonator banjo brand new in 1967. At that time Bacon banjos were built by Gretsch, and were often sold through departments stores - Dad got his through Montgomery Ward (it was drop shipped from Gretsch in a Gretsch box - I wish we still had the box!). Dad used the banjo for a couple of years, but, being more of a guitarist/singer, he eventually abandoned it. The banjo laid around the house for awhile - I messed around on it a few times but didn't really develop an interest in it either (by that time I was a teenager and was in a ROCK band so the banjo wasn't cool at all). Eventually Dad sold the banjo. Fast forward to 2007. The new owner of the banjo wasn't using it anymore and offered to sell it back to Dad. Dad said he wasn't interested, but I was talking to Dad one day and happened to ask, "So what ever happened to that old banjo?" He said it was in fact for sale. I jumped at the chance to recapture a piece of my youth and bought it. Besides, now older and "wiser" (okay - that's debatable), my taste in music still includes but extends beyond rock'n roll.

Anyway, the banjo was in really bad shape and was essentially unplayable. The strings were about a mile off the fretboard, the banjo (drum) head was worn out and wrinkled, and the old friction keys were shot - some slipped profusely and others were just plain stuck. The frets were green! Some of the chrome parts were rusted (as were the strings), and the fretboard had several pearloid dots that were missing. Dad and I tore it completely apart. I cleaned up all of the chrome parts with Comet and chrome polish, I used a Brite Boy on the frets, and I cleaned all of the wood parts with Old English. I machined a new aluminum neck shim for it, ordered a new shorter bridge and filed it to fit, and replaced the tuning keys with German-made units with planetary gears - these keys retain the vintage appearance while offering a modern 4:1 gear ratio. I replaced the fifth string tuner with a Five Star geared tuner as well, and I replaced the missing pearloid dots on the fretboard. I put a new Remo head on it and bought a torque key to properly tension (tune) the head. New Martin Vega strings completed the ensemble. FYI - I bought all of the parts from Stewart-MacDonald and Elderly Instruments. Anyway, after a few days of effort - the old banjo came back to life. It looks great and sounds fantastic! And, with the modern tuners, it's much easier to tune, and stays in tune.

With newly restored vintage banjo in hand, I began the task of learning how to play it. It turned out to be a lot easier than I feared. Since I fingerpick guitar proficiently, I already had the required technique. A 5-string banjo is tuned differently than a guitar, so I just had to learn "where the notes are". I decided not to dupilicate the efforts of others by learning traditional banjo tunes, but instead chose to find new ways to apply the banjo. Within a few weeks I had written several banjo songs, including a rather abstract piece called Legend Of The Elms.

I recorded the banjo part first, and built everything else around that. I added the sleighbells/car keys part after the banjo was done (yes, car keys combined with sleighbells sound really nice when recorded with a studio condenser microphone, although you need a key ring with several keys on it), and then added the woodblock and then the bass part. Dewayne added his sparse but very tasteful mandolin parts, and then I added the wine bottle (jug) parts. I tuned various wine bottles by putting a small amount of water in each bottle, tuning the bottle by adding or subtracting water in order to get the desired pitch (note). I'm not used to playing wind parts, and I just about passed out recording the wine bottle parts. (No, there wasn't any wine in the bottles...)

Katy Gibson
Brad - Katy Gibson was the first song written and recorded for the Second Wind album. Dewayne and his family had come over to hear some of the final mixes for the first Mandolin Wind Project album. They were just about to leave, and I picked up my classical guitar (a La Patrie Etude built in Canada) and started messing around on it while we were all talking. I remember it quite well - I was sitting at the bottom of the stairway that leads up into the family room, and started playing the pattern that defines Katy Gibson. Dewayne's eyes lit up. Excited, he asked "What's that?!!!" I replied, "I don't know..." He grabbed his mandolin and we wrote Katy Gibson on the spot in just a few minutes. I picked up my portable Superscope cassette tape recorder and we recorded a scratch copy so we wouldn't forget what we had done. (That trusty old Superscope cassette recorder has saved more songs from extinction than you can possibly imagine!) Whenever Dewayne and I sit down together with a mandolin and guitar, or drums and guitar, or mandolin and banjo - whatever - you can bet we will end up writing a song. Katy Gibson was the result of one of those times.

The song title just popped into my head. Katy Gibson is a fictional character, a little girl, maybe four or five years old, playing outside on a bright blue-sky summer day - maybe she's sitting on the back porch of an old farmhouse with her rag doll watering some flowers.

David Short plays a FANTASTIC violin solo on this song! Dewayne played the sleighbells and car keys. The bell at 1:54 is an old Christmas tree ornament that my wife threw in the trash. I rescued it and put it to use in the studio. Anything (ESPECIALLY a Christmas bell !!!) is a musical instrument in my house.

Dragonfly
Brad - Dragonfly was the first song Dewayne wrote after he bought his Michael Kelly Dragonfly mandolin. This was the first song where he used the Dragonfly mandolin for recording, too - hence the song title. Dragonfly features Dewayne's excellent sense of mandolin melody lines and chord structure.

Dewayne wanted a vamp out section that contrasted sharply with the song and I came up with the vamp out we used. Note that on the vamp out section - a Martin D-18 guitar is on the left, a Taylor 314CE guitar is in center, and a Mahogany Baby Taylor guitar is on the right. The fingerpicking chord drone is a Godin Acousticaster.

This is probably my favorite bass part on the album. The drum parts are a mixture of MIDI programmed parts and 'real' acoustic drums.

We had originally intended to fade the song out, but the 'trickle out' ending was just so cool and unorthodox we had to use it. I had made a temp mix of Dragonfly and put it on a CD with the song Ashes, with Dragonfly leading into Ashes. The abrupt end on Dragonfly segued perfectly into Ashes, so I kept it that way.

Ashes
Brad - While my wife and I were vacationing at Glacier National Park in Montana, we witnessed several forest fires. We also drove up to Bowman Lake and saw the devastation left behind by a forest fire that had swept through that area several years before. It is impossible to describe the magnitude of such destruction, and the immense sense of loss when driving through such an area can be overwhelming. However, if you take time to get out of your car and wander back into the ruins of the burnt timber, you will also witness hope. Rising out of the scorched earth you will see the beginnings of new plants and trees - the first signs of new life springing up from the ashes. Bright green, nearly flourescent, tufts of life burst forth from the black ashes and shoot upward, reaching for the sky. Sort of like the story of the Phoenix rising from its own ashes, as it were - the circle of life continuing on...

Anyway, I wrote Ashes on the keyboards. I sequenced the (MIDI) keyboard parts and bass, along with a temporary MIDI drum track, and then added the guitar parts. The guitar intro was recorded independently of the rest of the song, and was pasted into the song (ala "Good Vibrations", but without the tape splices - the world is digital now). After all that, Dewayne added the real drums.

There are dozens of guitar parts on this song - most of that spacey stuff swirling around in the background is actually made up of several electric guitar parts with lots of delay and reverb. Gearheads take note - my digital delay of choice for this song was the Boss DD-20, using its Tape Echo Mode. The reverb? A vintage (and now legendary) Lexicon PCM-60 Digital Reverb, Room Algorithm.

Dewayne used his 1929 black Gibson A-Model Mandolin on this song. That mandolin has an incredible sound, with lots of brilliant treble and deep bass, and it probably plays in tune better than any other mandolin I have ever heard.

We purposely held back on the guitar parts and mandolin parts in order to add suspense and anticipation to the song. When the sax finally makes its entrance, it provides an immense sense of musical release. I already had written the opening sax line when I brought Gary Riley into the studio, and I just about wore him out (or his mouth at least) getting that part perfect, recording take after take after take. But, being the pro that he is, Gary didn't give up until we got what we wanted. A superb sax performance, indeed.

My son and everybody else says this song sounds a lot like Pink Floyd, and I guess it might, but any resemblance is purely unintentional - of course, it might just be possible that I listened to way too much Pink Floyd back in the day...

Rio Vista
Brad - Rio Vista sprang out of nowhere. I was warming up in the studio on my guitar and just started jamming on the chord progression. Dewayne started jamming along and we made the song up, on the spot, in one pass. By sheer luck (or Divine guidance), I had my Superscope recorder running and captured the song as we made it up. It all happened so quickly, I don't think we would have been able to remember what we had played. After all, the song is only a minute and a half long. I ran the recorder in playback and told Dewayne that we needed to include the song on the album. He agreed. We re-recorded the song with proper microphones and recording techniques for the album, but the arrangement is exactly the same as the version we created in that impromptu, on-the-spot, one-and-a-half-minute burst of inspiration.

There are two guitar parts wrapped around one another in Rio Vista; together they produce the illusion of keyboards in the background even though there are none. The basic chord structure was played on a Godin Acousticaster, "pulling" the strings in a Latin comp-style fashion. Sliding arpeggios were played on my Mahogany Baby Taylor; the Baby Taylor was miked in stereo with two microphones - a Cascade M-20 near the twelfth fret (left channel) and a CAD GXL1200 near the treble side of the bridge (right channel). Lexicon flanging was applied to both guitar parts. Dewayne used his trusty old Gibson A-40. We miked it with a CAD M-37. Dewayne used brushes on the snare and floor tom.

Kelsey's Windmill
Brad - Dewayne has always had a fascination with windmills (he's probably shot a thousand photos of them). Kelsey is a mythical off-screen character in The Andy Griffith Show, kind of like Sarah the telephone operator. In one episode Ernest T. Bass talks about Old Man Kelsey's Creek, Old Man Kelsey's Lake, and finally Old Man Kelsey's Ocean. I guess we just thought he ought to have a windmill, too.

Acoustic guitar was all Martin D-18 (1976 model). Mandolin was all 1950's Gibson A-40, except the opening line on Verse 1 - we overdubbed that section with Dewayne's black 1929 Gibson A-Model, because it had more sustain on that line than the A-40. I added the banjo parts almost as an afterthought - they are probably my favorite banjo parts.

The Ghost At Goss Creek Bridge
Brad - This was my third banjo composition, and this song is just plain creepy and weird. Dewayne and I love it. It sounds like a movie soundtrack because it IS a movie soundtrack. The Legend Of The Elms screenplay includes an old truss style bridge over dark swampy Goss Creek along a narrow 1960's two lane highway, out in the middle of nowhere - next to Dead Man's Curve - not a place where you want to be alone in the middle of the night.

On a more down to earth note, I tried every expensive microphone in the studio until I finally found the banjo sound I was after with a couple of lowly Shure SM-57 microphones (THE microphone for rock and roll electric guitar speaker cabinets...). Those two road-warrior stage-worn 57's, having been pummeled by the roar of a Marshall guitar cabinet for more than two decades, are now my main banjo mics for recording. Go figure. (Unfortunately for them, the 57's still get pummeled by the roar of a Marshall guitar cabinet quite often - I bet they like the banjo better.)

The spacey swirling effect through the song is the Infinite Reverb algorithm from a Lexicon MPX-100 Digital Effects Processor. For my song, the reverb was initially set in motion by a banjo arpeggio that is not heard in the song - essentially an 'offscreen' riff that actually starts BEFORE the song starts. I played the arpeggio, stimulating the reverb sound, faded in the reverb on the mixer - and off we go.

The 'plink' sounds are done by picking behind the bridge on the banjo.

A lot of people don't believe in ghosts until they hear this song...

The sound of the swirling reverb fading into space at the end of the song ties the end of the album up nicely to its beginning. The album is opened by the the sound of the wind blowing through the elms in the morning, and the sound of the haunting breeze fading into the night over the waters of Goss Creek closes it. Spirit of the wind, rushing over the water. Hmm...