Creative Caffeine: Nashville Recording Studio

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Our good friend Dave Shipley(Foxwood Mastering), brought us about 12 more John Hartford 2″ tapes today for transfer into pro tools.  These are more tapes from the Aereoplane sessions as well as some later 80s sessions.  I am blown away by the sheer quantity of all of these recordings… “just keep the tape rolling”  was definitely the idea.

above: “Recording The Price of Peace”

“For a girl to say goodbye to her daddy’s smile is rough — can’t cover it up.”That’s one of the lines in a song written by 12-year-old Alyssa Gaddis of Springfield after hearing her father talk about deployment ceremonies for National Guard troops being sent overseas to Iraq and Afghanistan.Alyssa’s father, Chief Warrant Officer Jim Gaddis, isn’t being deployed, but after hearing the stories and witnessing a ceremony firsthand, the Springfield Christian School seventh-grader sat down and composed the lyrics to “The Price of Peace,” a song about a girl saying goodbye to her father as he prepares for war.

“It’s very sad, seeing the little girls clutch to their dad’s neck and cry,” Alyssa said Monday of the deployment event she witnessed. “That was hard to just watch, knowing that they are leaving and they are not going to come back for a long time.”

Full Article:

Young songwriter honors ‘price of peace’ – Springfield, IL – The State Journal-Register

We recently had The Gaddis Girls in the Studio with producer Hart Steen to record overdubs for the song “The Price of Peace,” a moving tribute to soldiers at war, from a daughters perspective.

(the following from ThePriceOfPeace.org)

The “Price of Peace” was written in early summer of 2008 by Alyssa Gaddis after a discussion she had with her father, CW5 Jim Gaddis. The discussion revolved around the large number of Soldiers that were deployed overseas while their families were left behind. Alyssa realized that it was probably as hard on the families as it was on the deployed Soldiers. Her dad gave her a pad of paper and told her to write down how she felt and the lyrics of The Price of Peace were born.

The family knew that the lyrics had merit so they enlisted the co-writing assistance of a Nashville writer, Hart Steen. Hart added the music and recorded a basic track to the lyrics. After a few discussions with some members of the IL Employee Support of the Guard and Reserves about the song, State Farm agreed to sponsor the recording. State Farm provided funding for the recording and production of the song.

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Creative Caffeine’s Telefunken U47… The U47 is perhaps the most legendary microphone in history.  Ours is completely original, pre-war tube and all… Sounds fantastic!!!

July has been a busy month for transferring old recordings to Pro Tools.  The sooner the better with these old tapes… if you wait too long they have to be baked due to excessive oxide shedding.  Creative Caffeine is one of the few studios setup to transfer 24 track analog tapes straight into Pro Tools HD with pristine Apogee converters.

Early this month John Mills transferred a number of 24 track tapes to Pro Tools for the highly respected John Anderson.  Chief engineer Collin Peterson has been working with Dave Shipley to transfer recordings for the Del McCoury Band, some of which may be featured on an upcoming release,  as well has some early recordings from John Hartford,  some of which featuring the Aereoplane band with Tut Taylor, Norman Blake, and Randy Scruggs!  Most of the McCoury tapes were 16 track 2″ recorded at Ricky Skaggs’ studio in Hendersonville. We were able to rent a 16 track head for our JH-24 and make that option available to clients at an extra charge.

Long-time client Donna Adler of Chicago recently did some live recording with Michael Johnson (above) and drummer Dave Lawbaugh  at Creative Caffeine.  Donna just finished an album she produced at Creative Caffeine and her light, folky sound is starting to gain momentum on various radio stations across the country.

This was one of the first sessions using 2 hand made Brandt Previs wood microphones.  We used only 2 Brandt mics on the kit with a Sennheiser MD421 on the kick.  This was a KILLER setup for the intimate style of drums Donna was looking for!

Michael’s gut string sounded great through our Telefunken U47, of course.

Upgrades at Creative Caffeine have commenced as we just installed an Apogee AD-16x and Rosetta 800 192, giving us 24 channels of Apogee analog to digital conversion at 24-bit 192kHz for our new Pro Tools HD2 Accel rig. Apogee makes some of the best converters in the business and we are anxious to get these up and running. We’ve been very fond of the radar 24 Nyquist converters we’ve been using for the past few years, so the Apogee units have pretty large shoes to fill. When combined with our analog tape machine, fabulous rooms, and vintage mic collection, we believe you’ll be hard pressed to find a better combo.

The Nashville Number System is simply the best and most practical way of charting your song for a recording session. Any studio player should be able to follow these charts with no problem. The primary advantage on using the number system over actual chord names, is that if the key to the song needs changed at the last minute, the charts don’t need re-written, nor does the musician have to transpose on the fly.

Things You’ll Need:

* Either a real piano keyboard or a simple mock up of one
* Knowledge of the basic note scale and where those notes exist on the keyboard
* Paper
* Pencil

Step 1:
If you are not familiar with the basic note scale and where it exists on the piano keyboard, just look it up on the Internet or have someone knowledgeable about the scale show you.

Step 2:
Once you know the basic note scale, write the scale down across the top of a sheet of paper, beginning with “C” and leaving a little space between each of the remaining notes.

Step 3:
Write the number “1″ above the letter “C,” the number “2″ above the letter “D” and so on across the scale. Once completed, you now have the core of the Number System in front of you. In the studio, if the players were preparing a “chart” for a song in the key of C, and the first, say, five chords to be played in the song were C, F, G, F, G, the “chart” would simply read 1-4-5-4-5.

Step 4:
The final step is what makes the number system so user friendly. Unlike conventional sheet music which has to be re-written for each key that the song needs to be played in, with the number system, you change keys simply by assigning the number 1 to the key of the song and then numbering the other notes accordingly. So, if the song is in the key of G, the G note in number 1 and so on.

Link to Original Article:
How To Learn the Nashville Studio Number System | eHow.com

LOS ANGELES: I’m standing inside a darkened eight-by-eight-foot recording booth in Nashville, Tennessee, staring into a microphone. A window looks into a small studio where the musicians I’ve hired are exchanging ideas in shorthand. I can hear them through my headphones (“Bob, come in one bar later on the vocal”), but I can’t see much. I feel vulnerable and excited. I wonder if this is what plastic surgery is like. After all, these specialists are nipping and tucking one of my most intimate parts: my song.

The song is “Finally Made ‘Em Dance,” a ballad sung by a musician to his inspirational mother. I had never been able to record it satisfactorily on the $400 eight-track home digital recorder I bought last year. As an amateur songwriter I love my eight-track because it lets me perform all the parts: no arguments in this band. But I am a sub-amateur musician who knows, at best, nine guitar chords. I can create a song of potential beauty, but after years in denial I admitted I needed cosmetic song surgery to realize that beauty.

And so, at 58, I shifted some retirement money to the life’s-too-short side of the ledger and headed from Los Angeles to Nashville, carrying a CD of “Dance” and four other songs. I would make a demo that sounded professional, right down to my singing. I kept my expectations low; I’d be happy if one pro said, “Good song.”

My guru on this journey was Steve Tveit, general manager of Omnisound Studios, housed in a small, boxy, steel-blue-painted brick building on a plain street a few blocks from Music Row. Tveit is one of my favorite in-laws (he’s married to my wife’s niece) because he’s been able to make a living in the music business, even if it means driving a ’97 Dodge Neon without a CD player.

I had joked for years about recording in Nashville with my own band of earnest L.A. amateurs. But this time, perhaps because I sounded serious, he suggested: Just bring yourself. You can hire the same session men the record companies use.

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