Get Tusked by Ken Caillat & Hernan Rojas

Author:Ken Caillat & Hernan Rojas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

13

DON’T WORRY BABY

The Beach Boys showed the way, and not just to California. They may have sold the California Dream to a lot of people, but for me, it was Brian Wilson showing how far you might have to go in order to make your own musical dream come true.

—LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM

The day had arrived at the studio for our digital audio sound demonstration by Soundstream out of Salt Lake City. It was the winter of 1979, and we would be one of the first rock bands to try, and possibly use, this new, cleaner, crisper sound format that would never lose its sound quality. This was the machine that restored the early Enrico Caruso recordings and made the first digital recording ever with an album by the Santa Fe Opera. After nearly losing Rumours to wear and tear on our master tapes, I was keen to give this a try on our own soap opera. Frank Wolf, our Village tech nerd and in-house jokester, brought in the Soundstream guy.

We soon found out that this little guy had to be there to babysit the sensitive digital equipment with its trays of custom-made circuit boards every day we used it. My red flags went up immediately. You see, Fleetwood Mac was a very close-knit family, albeit highly dysfunctional, and this newcomer would have to run the gauntlet to be accepted into the day-to-day studio life, or be a drug dealer. The band referred to this as “the Bubble,” and life inside it could be rough. The kid’s name was Rich Feldman. He looked like a teenager with a beard, but with a great smile that told you he liked to laugh.

“Boy, I don’t envy your job!” I said. “Do you always have to babysit this equipment?”

“Yes, the company only recently was able to miniaturize the computer system into a portable rig, and it has to be monitored constantly,” he replied confidently.

“Where do you want all this equipment to go?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know. Somewhere out of the way? How’s Chicago sound?”

“We’ll put it into the machine room. If we do something long term, we can figure something else out,” said Frank, looking it over warily.

Rich told me they had done some great orchestral live recordings. I said I wasn’t interested in hearing something that we didn’t work on since we didn’t usually do one-take live performances in the studio.

“Can you record us now digitally and so we could compare it to the analog recording, and then A/B them side by side?”

“Sure,” Rich said. “Do you want to play something live and I’ll record you?”

“Well, let me make sure we understand how this works: your machine is only a stereo recorder, not a multitrack recorder?” I asked

“That’s correct” Rich said.

“Then the only way we can use your system is to do our stereo mixes to it.”

“Correct again.”

“Okay then; let’s throw on Chris’s song, ‘Honey Hi,’ and I’ll try making a rough mix of it and recording it to our half-inch analog tape machine and simultaneously to your rig.

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