Category Archives: Recording

News, Recording

New year is here: Back to work, lazy mothers!

Leave a comment

Well, that was a nice little holiday break, and we all had a bit of a laugh. But now it’s 2024, dudes – time to get back down to it. No more messing around, no more late rising. You had your vacation, damn it! Nose to the grindstone, my fine little friends.

That’s my version of a pep talk. I’ve never been much in the way of a motivational speaker, especially when the audience is me and my brother. Neither one of us wants to take any of THAT guy’s bullshit. And as you know from long experience, Big Green is a leaderless collective. We don’t subscribe to self-imposed hierarchies. Nor do we subscribe to the daily paper, or even a monthly newsletter. But I digress.

A far safer Forbin Project

I’m not sure, but I think we’re in year two of producing this particular album. And if you include the year or so we spent working out which album we were going to make (new songs or retreads), call it three. Why does it take Big Green so damn long to make a record? Well, there are three reasons:

  1. We’re slow as a mother. Always have been, always will be. That’s just the speed we’re built for, man – can’t help it. What the hell, it took us five years to finish International House, and it takes less than an hour to listen to the s.o.b.
  2. We’re oldsters. That’s part of the reason for #1. Not much we can do about that shit. Stick around long enough and you’ll be old, too.
  3. We’re busy-ass mo-fo’s. Matt in particular has a raft of responsibilities. I myself don’t have a raft, but I have responsibilities. Hence, we record maybe once a week, whether we need to or not.

Thing is, we tend to approach each album like it’s the Forbin Project. Whether you’re building Colossus or Guardian, it’s a heavy lift. Though thankfully, unlike the Forbin project, the fate of the world doesn’t hang in the balance … and Patty Duke’s father plays no role whatsoever in our production process.

Leftovers and tailings

Some of you (and you know who you are) have asked if there won’t be a sample or two of the current project available at some point. No man can say! We like to toss random recordings out there from time to time – some are leftovers, some are tailings or abandoned experiments. (As you know, Dark Christmas was one of those from our first album, 2000 Years to Christmas.)

The truth is, we haven’t even done any rough mixes yet, which is kind of nuts. We’re also in the process of upgrading from Cubase 9 to Cubase 12 (yes, I know – they just released 13, the motherfuckers) and changing platforms. And hell, we’ve got at least 25 songs under serious construction, with another 15 to 20 started. And another thing …. OUCH.

We’ll get this sucker done, trust me. Or my name isn’t … uh … whatever it is.

Random Lyric

Here’s an old one by Big Green co-founder Ned Danison:

Now the picture in my mind is hazy
Just like the number’s washed off my hand
I’m just another nameless no one
She’s just another faceless one night stand

From the song “A Name and a Face”. Listen to the demo we recorded in 1986:

BIG GREEN 1986 DEMO

News, Recording

In the studio with America’s most obscure band

Leave a comment

Dad always told us, be the best in the world at something. Actually, I don’t think it was dad who said that – probably some random stranger passing us on the street. Doesn’t matter. Find something to be best at, he said, and we went and did it. Someone had to be the most obscure band in America, we thought. Why not us?

Well, the nearly forty-year-old unknown quantity known as Big Green is back in its makeshift studio again. Another project, another album … call it what you like. We’ve got a heap of songs to record, once again, and we’re doing it the only way we know how – under the radar.

By The Numbers

So how’s the new project going? It’s going, as the old saying goes. It’s hard to qualify our progress, so I will try to quantify it for you. Here are the numbers we’re working with. And bear in mind, none of us are even amateur mathematicians.

80-plus – That’s the rough number of songs we started out with as potentially being part of this album. The vast, vast majority were written by Matt, and a handful by me (a.k.a. Joe).

40-plus – Another imprecise number, this one representing the number of recordings we’ve started since we began this project last year. This doesn’t include a couple of early demos we did prior to 2022.

24 – Finally, a solid number! This is the number of recordings we’ve concentrated on – songs that include substantially more than a reference guitar track.

20 – This is how many recordings have keyboard parts, mostly piano. Some are midi parts, some d.i. from my Korg SV-1. Coincidentally, this is also the number with main vocal tracks, 8 with backup vocals.

18 – The current number of songs with a bass track. (We’ve been furiously adding them in recent weeks.)

17 – That’s the number of tracks that have fully programmed drum parts. This is typically something that happens in pre-production, but we don’t do that. That would be preposterous.

Name That Album

When does this whole thing come to a conclusion? No man can say. We don’t even have a working title for the album. Call it Splunge or something, just for the time being. If we had a different name, the album title might suggest itself. For instance, if the name of our band was “Choosy Mothers”, the album title would almost have to be “Jif”. The name Big Green doesn’t suggest anything to me at all.

Mistaken Identity

Then there are those times when we get confused with artists that actually have a following. It’s usually the result of a coincidence in song titles. Here’s one right now:

Volcano Man, by Big Green
Recording

Getting started in Garageband: a resource

Leave a comment

Over the years, lots of people have asked us how we do our recordings. And when I say “lots”, I mean more that one …. in these socially isolated times, that seems like lots to me.

Because we are an independent, unsigned, non-commercial musical collective, we have made very little use of proper studios, even when producing our albums. (We’ve released three, by the way, not that anyone’s counting.) In fact, all of our albums were recorded at home, using the tools available at any given time. In prehistoric times, that meant charcoal and flint. As the aeons passed, though, our tools got a bit sharper.

It will surprise few of you to learn that none of us has any training in audio engineering. What we know, we’ve learned largely through trial and error, partly through interacting with other, more knowledgeable people, and partly through reading articles, blog posts, etc. Hell, we’re musicians, not technicians, right? (Some might argue with the first claim in that sentence, but oh well … haters gotta hate.)

Yeah, that's the shit.

Over the course of Big Green’s forty some-odd year history, we’ve gone from recording on reel-to-reel decks, to bouncing tracks on multiple cassette machines, to analog cassette portastudios, to an 8-track DTRS system, to a 16/24-track Roland workstation, to various versions of Cubase, which is where we’re at now. It’s like we were born in the stone age and are now living in a soft-touch laser land. (I get whiplash just thinking about it.) But as far as the know-how to run this technology is concerned, well …. that’s another matter.

Suffice it to say that, like any indie band with zero budget, we have relied to a certain extent on the kindness of strangers, so to speak, to help us through the production and engineering work involved in any project. And thanks to the advent of the internet (a.k.a. that series of tubes), there are a lot of resources out there to help guide you through the fine points. Some are good. Some …. well …. not so much.

So, if you’re just getting started with recorded music and you don’t know how to begin, here’s a suggestion: check out this article by our friends at Beginner Guitar HQ entitled How To Record in Garageband. The thing we like about this piece is that it starts with software that comes with every Mac computer, so if you have access to a Mac, this can be really useful. The only hardware you need is a digital interface – we currently use a Focusrite Saffire DSP unit, but you can get units that do the same thing for a lot less, as this article suggests. The piece takes you through the process one step at a time, explains the basic concepts, and invites you to interact with the authors – not too shabby. (Wish to hell we had help like this when we were starting out, in those dark days before the internets.)

Anyway, you young people, you …. Give this a read and let us know what you think:

https://beginnerguitarhq.com/how-to-record-in-garageband/