SESSION shenanigans
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related to us by Mitch Dalton. This month: A day in the obsessive compulsive life. Or Tales From The Backline, as it goes.
Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains, as any fule kno. And although Mr Carlyle’s 19th century dictum predates Pet Sounds by a century, its continuing relevance resonated recently during two entirely unconnected studio dates. And not in a good way.
I guess the sad truth is that in order to do this session guitar playing thing for a living, you gotta be...hmm...how I do I put this with more diplomatic Messi than Matic? Well, Mad. That pretty much covers it. Sadly, a career spent second guessing every possible studio scenario will have you baying at the moon like a canine Clapton as your tenuous grip on mountains and molehills loosens like a rattly pair of Chinese EL84s. However, If you’re prepared to meet me halfway and permit me to append the description Professionalism rather than Paranoia to this tale, I could be persuaded to continue. Albeit keeping one suspicious ear open for a dawn raid by the The Fretting Squad, naturally.
Exhibit A. The diary service calls. A pick-up session - American for last minute changes - for Wonderstruck, a movie whose release is imminent. Abbey Road Studio 2. Acoustic Guitar.
Composer Carter Burwell, he of Twilight, Legend, The Big Lebowski and much more, will be directing matters from across the ocean with the assistance of modern telephonic wizardry. So far, so worrying, because I seem to remember playing a heap of cues for this celluloid caper earlier in the year. But on The Spanish Guitar. Or Classical Guitar. Or Nylon Strung Guitar. Or whatever the contractor is calling it this week. It is an acoustic guitar, obviously. But not an Acoustic Guitar, as such. Not a steel-strung instrument, to be clear. A misunderstanding, perchance?
Okay. One guitar becomes two. I extract my Kevin Aram SpanishCornish instrument from its cupboard. And I also take out my Takamine Acoustic. Best to be certain of perfect intonation though. Carter is a man who is not unknown to the The Perfection Police either. So, on goes a brand new set of Elixirs, 12-52. Ho hum. That’s forty five minutes of your life you don’t get back. As a grizzled colleague once advised me as I watched him living up to his own words - “Never change strings in your own time.”
But wait. The Duchess of Doubt is now making an official visit, accompanied by her entire entourage. What if the acoustic sound is now too heavy for the date? What if a gentler, more delicate timbre is required? Perhaps fingerstyle?
Aaaargh. There’s nothing for it. Two becomes three. Out comes the rather lovely Patrick Eggle Acoustic. (Particularly lovely because he gave it to me.) And on goes a new set of 11-49s. And thus, clutching a trio of Lite-flite cases and a satchel of accessories for every conceivable emergency (and a few inconceivable ones to boot) I set sail.
I arrive at the iconic recording home of UK Showbiz. I skilfully evade the hordes of Japanese tourists as they hurl themselves in front of my wheels in a senseless Beatles-esque simulation of Death-By-Zebra-Crossing. The nice man invites me to park directly in front of the hallowed portals. It surely cannot get any better than this today. And it doesn’t.
I stagger into the new acoustic booth in the recently remodelled Studio 2 with my luggage and am greeted by a video screen, a couple of mics, a not-so-comfy chair and a music stand. Upon the latter is a folder marked “Guitar”. So far, so utterly predictable. I open the suspiciously slim wallet. It contains precisely two cues. 3M32 is approximately eighty cinematically slow bars in length. I am required to count to seventy six on the fingers of but two hands and then give an evocative rendition of four semibreve (that’s whole notes to you Trans Atlantic hep cats) chords. I must confess that two of ‘em are a tad quirky and a bit of a stretch. But. Nevertheless. Four chords. And a helluva of an anxiety-inducing wait each time.
As it happens, there are eight times in all. It takes an hour and a half. But I like to think that we achieve something close to picking perfection by the end.
We break for a cuppa. We return for 3M33. It is beautifully copied, not unlike its close cousin. The main distinguishing feature is that, while elegantly transcribed to include every time signature and tempo change, every bar’s rest, and each subtle change in the click track, my part contains no actual notes. Nothing. It is in fact a tacet sheet made into a work of art. I am thanked. I am asked to wait - just in case. And exactly three hours, four chords and several guitars later, I am on my way back home.
By the way I own a thing called an OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Distortion. It’s rather a good overdrive pedal, in all fairness. However, I’d have bought it whatever it sounded like. But you knew that already.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for next month’s Exhibit B, in which our intrepid hero commits a compulsive cock-up in Islington...
a career spent second-guessing every scenario will have you baying at the moon like a canine clapton