A Chat With The Producer
After a rather harrowing week last month involving seven inches of rain in two or three hours that resulted in a flooded basement and a compromised computer requiring a new motherboard, the opportunity to ride to Lexington and talk about how to proceed on the project was a tremendous relief. It was also fairly short and to the point.
Lexington School of Recording Arts Producer Michael T. had already been listening and had some thoughts. He was mostly interested first in how I wanted to arrange the bluegrass tunes and which ones were to be considered bluegrass. My preferences in bluegrass run to newgrass first and Monroe grass later, but I’m okay with a straightforward guitar/bass/banjo/mandolin configuration, with perhaps a bit of fiddle here and there, mostly because session fiddlers are hard to find, even in Kentucky. Michael asked about Dobro, but I told him I didn’t have access to any Dobro players. As for fiddlers, I had a couple in mind and we agreed that I would see if I could get in touch with either of them and find out if they were interested in the work.
The rest of the tunes are a mixed bag: some country, some Americana, a couple of Caribbean -flavored tunes. Michael said that there were some good session players that they had access to, particularly a guitarist that LIR owner Wil F. was very high on. I said I was agreeable, since I was interested in getting the thing done.
Back in Louisville, I talked with a couple of players who expressed an interest and willingness to do the sessions. As always, the problem is the difference between session players and pickers: session players can walk in, grab the charts and lay down very excellent tracks very rapidly. Pickers cannot, most of the time, though many of them think they can.
Unsolicited advice here: always go with session musicians if they are available, even if you have players in a band. The session players will save you money and time and then you can insist that your band members learn those parts. Really.
Looking on down the road, the opportunity to do an acoustic Americana television show is coming to fruition rapidly, with all the ad spots taken. Several of us involved will meet with the station manager/technical director to work out the production issues and infomercial questions, then set a kickoff date. The first taping, or a least a test taping, will happen on November 16 at Gerstle’s Place in St. Matthews.
What’s most interesting about this whole process is the number of peripheral things in play, including the TV show, the ad hoc house band and parts of the marketing component. It puts me in mind of a lot of the spiritual/new age stuff of the Sixties: visualize what you want to make it happen. I think I’ll just keep putting one foot in front of the other.