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[ IS MY CAREER OVER? | Larry Mitchell ] photo by Wade Allen
After a bunch of bad record company deals and people in NYC not hiring me because they still thought I was on tour, my friend Sam said I needed to do a new record. I told him I didn’ t have the money to record another record. I wasn’ t going to ask my friends to let me use their studio for free again and I had little idea what to do with a record in the event I found myself in a position to record one. Sam had a small project studio in his basement in Queens. He said,“ Here’ s the keys to my house, go make a record”.
THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP Up until that point I had really only been on the playing side of the glass, except for a few moments with 4 track cassette recorders. I made my way down to Sam’ s house every day. I’ m fortunate that I have some amazing friends in the recording business that are world class; very successful engineers and producers, mixers and mastering engineers. These friends were very kind to me. They stopped whatever they were doing to take my phone calls and give me advise on everything from mic’ ing to EQ, compression, and recording in general. Some put major artists on hold to help me.
I also got help with some great players that would come down to this basement in Queens, NY to play on the record. And in the end, I made a bad electric guitar album. I wrote bad songs. While trying to fix it another friend asked,“ Why don’ t you record some of those acoustic songs you’ ve written lately?”
I was living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan. Most of my electric gear was in storage. I had an electric or two, a nylon string acoustic guitar and a little Yamaha QY20 sequencer. I had been learning how to sequence on it and had written and sequenced some cool sounding song tracks to go along with the acoustic guitar parts. I started recording those songs, laying down the sequenced parts first, then trying to record acoustic parts.
Key words of wisdom my friends gave. 1. Don’ t overly EQ anything. If It doesn’ t sound good, move the mic. 2. If it still doesn’ t sound good, change the mic. Try another one. 3. If it still is not good, change the guitar.
There were a few guitars in the basement: 12 strings, steel strings, etc. I followed that advise and things went smoothly. I still follow that
64 Sep � Oct 2017 GearTechRec. com