#76: Humans!

Clockwise from left: yo, Fernando Martinez (session engineer), David Bensimon (producer), and Fernando Samalea (human)

When I say I’ve been “in the studio” I usually mean a particular room in this apartment. I can record almost everything here. And sometimes it seems like I am recording everything, given how much of the street the microphones pick up. But I know the sonic rhythms of this neighborhood, when there’s likely to be a quiet spell, a window of time in which to set up a mic and grab a few takes. Likewise, I have a pretty good idea of when the neighbors are at home: the family upstairs with the very young child, the psychoanalyst downstairs with her clients’ inner children. I try to keep them all in mind when my inner child is, say, looking for a certain electric guitar sound, one which requires an unneighborly decibel level.

But a guitar amp is not always necessary. Sometimes it’s not even preferable. An electric guitar plugged straight into a good preamp or audio interface via DI (direct injection) is a beautiful thing. Recording this way (and using headphones to monitor), I can work anytime, bothering no one.

Drums are another story. I would never inflict a real drum kit on my neighbors. And recording drums is way beyond my skill set. Sure, they can be created “inside the box” (in the computer) or with a stand-alone drum machine, like the Akai MPC. Sometimes that’s what you want. But sometimes only a human drummer will do—for all the obvious reasons: their ideas, the particular way they strike the drums, how they tune them, where they feel the beat, the jokes they crack, because it’s nice to hang around with other humans from time to time.

For all of our reliance on computers, this project might still be considered “old school”. David Bensimon, one of my collaborators, tells the story of a recent visit to a recording studio at Warner Music in Buenos Aires. He was producing something for the wonderful Clara Ballestero. When they entered the room everyone looked at them like they had two (or four) heads. Why? Because they were carrying instruments. Apparently all the other artists come in carrying only laptops. I’m not saying good music can’t be made that way. It absolutely can. It’s the looks of incredulity I find a bit concerning, as if David and Clara had emerged from the elevator on horseback.

Keeping it human, this week we booked an actual recording studio to record an actual human drummer, the very talented Fernando Samalea. I’d been really looking forward to it, having listened to his playing over the years. He’s worked with many of the greats here in Argentina: Charly Garcia and Gustavo Cerati most famously, but also on a fantastic 1995 record by an group called Illya Kuryaki and the Valderramas. The record is called Chaco, and lately I’m a bit obsessed with it. Fernando is also an exquisite bandoneon player and photographer. Here’s a short clip of him doing some minor bridge work on Tactical…

We got more humanity than we bargained for. I don’t just mean his delightful three-dimensional presence in spacetime, or the fabulous work he did. I mean the blood. He nicked a finger on a hi-hat screw of an unfamiliar drum kit. But so unwavering, so absolute is his commitment that he did three more takes before telling us about it. Way to pass the audition! I can’t imagine a Roland-808 or an Akai MPC2000 or one of those laptops showing such dedication.

He patched himself up and kept going, helping us try out different approaches to a song I’m building around a poem, one I don’t want to alter—that is, adapt. Not so easy. As I think I’ve said before, poems bring their own music. They resist being hung on the verse-chorus scaffolding of a 3 minute 14 second pop song. Adding melody, harmony, time, tempo can feel invasive—not so much gilding the lily as crushing it. So this one may or may not see the light of day, though I’m feeling a bit more inclined to try harder now that actual human blood has been spilled on its behalf.