For those of us who have not done studio work, can you clarify what you mean about the nod from the ending fadeout guy? Do you mean you keep playing through the part that is eventually faded out by the engineer on the final record, until such point as the fadeout guy tells you to stop playing?? I'm not understanding why this was pointed out. Would you have naturally stopped playing earlier based on the circumstances?
The fade out was simply a vamp on the last section of the chart being repeated over and over. When we were tracking we just kept playing. When the song is engineered, the engineer will fade out the ending on the track. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, you would hear Steve Smith start to stretch on the endings on the Journey songs which faded out. Steve didn't know how much was going to be kept in the final product.
The end of the song will never be heard on the final product and there wasn't a good place to develop a "tag" on some songs - they just didn't lend themselves to it.
The reason why this was pointed out was that you should keep playing until the guy in charge says stop (by making eye contact with everyone and nodding his head) as opposed to "trying to dictate by telepathy as to what the drummer wants the rest of the band to do because they should completely understand where the drummer was trying to go musically." And I use this last phrase because it was used by a female singer to the rest of the band a few years back in a different situation. I don't have telepathy and I don't expect anyone else to either. In this recording session, spontaneity wasn't the primary goal, like it was, say, for Miles Davis' or Warren Cucurullo's projects. Miles was interested in "capturing the moment" and the moment to Miles, was perfection.
Like I said in the intial post, these were just notes which I made so that the next time, I remember and everything comes together with less effort and fewer mistakes. I felt that the notes were worth sharing just like a friend used to share how, because he wanted to do session work, he would look at who produced the albums which were climbing the charts so that he would have a feel for what would make him a successful studio musician.
You have to remember that the drum track has to be good enough for everything else to be good enough and that the first take may have the best of everyone else's playing on it (maybe the guitar solo was really rockin' and you don't want to have to throw away the take because the drum track was sub-par).
One other thing which I just remembered is that I deliberately did keep most everything simple - I did play fills and such. While the guitar player stacked on more parts on one song, I realized after he had done something on one song that the song was better off with me leaving space (sonic space, if you will) because playing more would have cluttered the song up.
Mike
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