With the unparalleled success of American Idol, musical contests
have never been more popular. The TV show features wanna-be pop stars
belting out Top 40 hits for a panel of judges and a live audience that
rate their performances and eventually select the next American idol.
Acoustic Guitar's Homegrown CD Awards contest is pretty
similar, except that contestants submit recorded, mostly original music
and are judged on the quality of their music, as well as the recording
and packaging, rather than by the smoothness of their complexion and
the whiteness of their teeth.
This year's contest, affectionately known around Acoustic Guitar's
office as the Homies, is the third of its kind, and it generated quite
a bit of hullabaloo among our readers. Several hundred acoustic guitarists
were inspired to put their best tunes on CD and get them in by the March
31 deadline in hopes of public acclaim and $500 worth of recording equipment
from contest sponsor First Quality Musical Supplies (www.fqms.com).
The entries were impressive, and we spent hundreds of hours listening
to music, reading liner notes, and narrowing down the pool of contestants.
The three winners chosen represent a wide range of musical genres.
Italy's Roberto Dalla Vecchia earned a Homie with Sit Back,
a cleanly recorded collection of melodic, mostly original flatpicked
instrumentals. Classical guitarist Jessica Papkoff took home a prize
for Impressions, her carefully arranged and exquisitely played
homage to French composer Claude Debussy. And Chicago-area band Dick
Smith won with Smoke Damage, an oddly appealing collection
of swamp-rock songs played on vintage acoustic instruments recorded
live in the studio. Each of the winners overcame different hurdles on
their way to success, and they were all happy to share their stories.
Roberto
Dalla Vecchia
Sit Back, Roberto Dalla Vecchia's second recording, features
nine original instrumentals and one traditional arrangement, all presented
as solo guitar pieces or with cello or bass accompaniment. Dalla Vecchia
played a Taylor 710 and a homemade guitar based on the Martin 000-28.
Considering that he was influenced by the legendary Doc Watson as well
as Italian flatpicking great Beppe Gambetta, Dalla Vecchia's guitar
teacher, it's no surprise that his tunes are musical and melodic and
his playing nearly flawless. "My goal was to record an acoustic
CD with melodies strong enough to be appealing to a wide range of listeners,"
he says, "not only guitar players." Some of the tunes evolved
during live performances before the recording was made, and others were
rehearsed only in Dalla Vecchia's home in Vicenza, Italy, he says, "with
my wife telling me what she liked and what to change."
Dalla Vecchia produced the CD with the help of recording engineer Aldo
Menti. "He has a very good ear for acoustic instruments,"
says Dalla Vecchia. "He knows how to mic them, even if the tools
he uses are not top-notch." Everything was recorded live in the
studio except the lead guitar part in "Fly High." Dalla Vecchia
sat in a corner of the room with two panels behind him creating a square.
Menti recorded the solo tracks with two AKG C 414 B mics, one pointed
at the guitar's neck/body joint from about a foot and a half away and
one positioned over Dalla Vecchia's right shoulder. The signal
was run through a compressor-limiter and an Akai MG 12-14 mixer before
going to a Pioneer CD writer.
Dalla Vecchia created cellist Stefania Cavedon's parts by humming into
a tape recorder while playing guitar. In the studio, he and Cavedon
sat about two yards apart with one mic on each of them. For the pieces
that included acoustic bass player Toni Moretti (who performs in a trio
with Dalla Vecchia and Dobro player Paolo Ercoli), Dalla Vecchia sat
behind a panel but was able to see Moretti through a small window. He
usually played through each piece three or four times and later selected
the best take, which was occasionally the first. "The more I play
a piece, the worse it gets!" he quips.
When the recording sessions were completed, Menti added a bit of reverb
with an Ibanez SDR1000+ effects processor and mastered the recording
on his Mac using Macromedia's SoundEdit 16 software. Dalla Vecchia created
the track order to vary the tempos and spread out the four pieces with
accompaniment. He noticed that on many of his favorite CDs the third
track is an "important" one, so he filled that slot with his
favorite slow piece, "Whispering Grove," a duet for guitar
and cello.
Dalla Vecchia learned some valuable lessons along the way. Next time
around he'll be more careful during the final mastering. "The low
frequencies on one of the tracks are way too loud," he says. He
also says that because he recorded only two songs in each session, the
setup of the mics was slightly different every time, which made the
sound of his guitar somewhat inconsistent from track to track. Overall,
he is happy with the results and the entire process, and especially
with the sound of the AKG mics. For more information about Dalla Vecchia,
visit www.robertodallavecchia.com.
Sit Back is also available through www.flatpickingmercantile.com.
Jessica
Papkoff
Seattle's Jessica Papkoff plays steel-string guitar in several folk
bands, but her first love is classical guitar. She earned music degrees
from the University of California at Davis and the Yale University School
of Music and studied privately with such noted players as Eliot Fisk,
Pepe Romero, and Sharon Isbin. Impressions, her first CD, celebrates
the work and influence of French composer Claude Debussy. "The
core of the CD is Manuel de Falla's homage to Debussy," she says.
"Right next to that is Francis Poulenc's ‘Sarabande for Guitar.'
And I couldn't have an homage to Debussy without having a piece by Debussy,
so I arranged ‘Syrinx' [for solo flute] on the guitar. The fingerings
worked out pretty well."
Those three pieces, which she plays with soul and fluidity, form the
meditative core of the recording, and Papkoff decided to bookend them
with snappier, better-known works by Joaquin Turina, Heitor Villa-Lobos,
Abel Carlevaro, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
After
deciding on the repertoire, Papkoff set up a series of weekend recording
sessions with professional engineer David Lange ("one of the best
engineers for acoustic music in the area," according to Papkoff)
and prepared one piece for each session. Her day job testing software
prevented her from learning and recording all the pieces in one fell
swoop. "Before every session I was so nervous," she recalls.
"It was like a performance. Maybe that helped the energy in the
long run."
Before they began recording, she and Lange listened to some CDs from
her collection. "I brought him a few I liked and a few I didn't
like," Papkoff says. "We both liked the sound of Contatos
by Cristina Azuma [GSP]. As a listener, you feel that you are fairly
close to the performer, and there's just enough reverb. Too much takes
away the detail and clarity."
In the first session, Papkoff and Lange experimented with guitars and
mic placement and opted to record her 1981 Dake Traphagen guitar with
a Neumann U 87 mic and a Brüel and Kjaer (B&K) 4001 mic. "The
Neumann was fairly close to the bridge," she says, "maybe
six inches away. And the B&K was pointed at the 12th fret."
She used Savarez Alliance treble strings and D'Addario polished
basses. "I was careful to change strings about the same number
of days prior to each session so they'd have time to settle and
would sound the same from session to session," she says. The mic
signals were then recorded with an Akai DR4d hard-disk recorder. Lange
later added a touch of reverb with a Lexicon PCM 90.
Papkoff played all the way through each piece two or three times, and
then she and Lange chose the best take, editing in pieces of other takes
in some sections on the Akai. "I made photocopies of the music
so we had that to look at when we made edit decisions," she explains.
"We'd listen back and mark up the music. That process worked
really well."
Papkoff sings the praises of the Neumann U 87 mic. She recommends experimenting
with mic placement and getting opinions from others when you get too
mired in the details. If she had it to do over again, she says, she'd
probably schedule the recording sessions closer together so it wouldn't
be so hard to stay motivated and finish the project. You can visit Papkoff
online at www.fretgirl.com.
Dick
Smith
The band Dick Smith took home a Homie for Smoke Damage, a
lo-fi, rootsy, country-rock collection whose lyrical themes are best
described as tongue-in-cheek bleak. The name of the band is code for
that little flask of whiskey you keep in your pocket so, as band member
Bob Kuhn explains, "you can go to the bar once and keep freshening
up your drink." Indeed, the devil's brew runs deep and wide through
the original songs on Smoke Damage, from "Kettle O' Fire"
to "Whiskey Bottle" and beyond.
The
core of the band is Kuhn on vocals, mandolin, and guitars; Dave Nelson
on Dobro and guitars; and Dave Ramont on vocals, banjo, guitar, and
concertina. The trio rehearses and gigs regularly and collaborates on
all the songwriting. For some of the band's bigger gigs, they bring
in the Other Dicks–Tom Jancauskas on bass, Scott Stevenson on accordion,
Christopher Walke on lap steel, Randy Henry on acoustic bass, and Rob
Klinkey on drums–and these musicians ("all our buddies")
contributed to various tracks on the recording.
According to the band, the success of the CD is due to the strength
of the songs and "really cool guitars," including a Dobro,
a Guild F-50R, an old Kay archtop, and a koa resonator guitar built
by one of Ramont's guitar students. Kuhn, Ramont, and Nelson are
all guitar players, but when they formed Dick Smith they agreed that
there couldn't be more than one guitar on each song. "When
Dick Smith was hatched, we all grabbed instruments we couldn't
really play," says Kuhn. As for the seedier side of life that the
songs explore, says Nelson, "We don't candy-coat the songs.
If a song is a little too nice, we wipe our feet on it and make it more
real."
The basic tracks were recorded live in a basement studio and engineered
by bass player Tom Jancauskas. "Tom has a great set of ears and
a couple of good microphones," says Ramont. "We wanted the
guitars and Dobros and stuff to sound like you're sticking your
head in front of them. He's good at capturing that." Jancauskas
set up the studio so the musicians could see one another. "We tried
to jam the drummer into his own spot," says Ramont. "There's
definitely bleed, but Tom is great at controlling that, and it makes
for a great, live sound."
"Tom was careful to mic everything [using Shure SM81s and a Neumann
U 87 with a custom-built Fred Cameron preamp] to create as much warmth
as possible," Kuhn adds. The only instruments that were recorded
direct were lap steel and electric bass, which was overdubbed after
the fact. "We call it stealth bass," Ramont quips. Recording
some of the more unusual parts, such as luggage, whistle, and "possibly
a doll," presented something of a challenge. "The jug and
the trunk and the mouth harp were fun to record," Kuhn recalls.
"We ended up putting the mic inside the trunk."
Possibly the eeriest and most emotive sound on the record is the "boxful
of spooks and ghost helicopters" on the mournful "Hazard Pay."
Nelson created the sounds by singing into the f-holes of his 1940s Regal
archtop, which is equipped with a Fishman archtop bridge pickup. "I
tuned the guitar to E G A E G A, ran the signal through a little bit
of chorusing and delay and through my Maestro FuzzTone, and the boxful
of spooks and ghost helicopters was born," he says.
Everything was captured digitally and edited on an Alesis hard-disk
recorder and then mixed on a Yamaha O2R mixer. A little bit of digital
delay and compression were added to the guitar signal. The CDs were
manufactured by Oasis, and the packaging (a folded cardboard design
instead of a jewel box) was artfully designed by the band on a home
computer equipped with QuarkXPress.
If they had it to do over again, there isn't much the band would do
differently. "It would be fun to spend a little more time in the
studio experimenting," says Ramont. "And bring some of the
other players into the songwriting process," Nelson adds, "to
work in some of the other textures ahead of time and see where that
goes." Dick Smith can be found on the Web at www.clayheadrecords.com.
Hear
You Next Year
That wraps up the 2003 Homegrown Awards contest. Congratulations to
our winners and thanks to our sponsor First
Quality Musical Supplies for the generous prizes. Listen to clips
of the winning CDs above, and start working on your submission for next
year. Heed the advice of this year's winners: start with your best material,
use high-quality microphones and the best recording equipment you can
get your hands on, take some time to experiment, and, in the end, trust
your instincts. Good luck!
