About this time last year, I spent a couple of weeks producing a record for a young New Brunswick fiddler named Janelle Dupuis. When I agreed to do the project, I was anticipating plenty of time to plan the project, and even more time to fine tune it after the fact. I had also hoped to help steer and promote the album when it actually came out. Unfortunately, I ended up squeezing it into the middle of an unexpectedly busy round of promotion for The Hard & the Easy. As a result, I hardly talked about it at all. A few weeks ago I listened to it again when I loaded it onto my Ipod, and it made me think a lot about the whole process.
The first time I ever met a real producer was when we met Danny Greenspoon, at the first pre-production sessions for the Up album. At the time it was an eye-opener, and an unpleasant one. Danny demanded that we dissect and then reconstruct every part, every song, every lyric, and every arrangement, and make sure every idea was as good as it could possibly be before we recorded a single note. And then in the studio he expected that we play and sing to a standard we were barely capable of. It was painful and unpleasant, and the more intuitive players in the band bristled under his demands. Despite all the ego blows, we knew it would be worth it, and that we were learning something important. The half million-plus sales of the album confirm that he knew what he was doing.
Since then we have worked with many producers, and both myself and Alan have sat on the other side of the board quite a few times. It can be a fascinating collaboration. A good producer comes to the table with lots of musical ideas, a realistic vision for the album, a bag of sounds, technical knowledge, and the ability to get great performances out of people. Good producers can also add that unexpected outside element, that extra piece of magic that makes a good track great. A couple of examples from our own past might be Steve Berlin's organ on Jack Hinks, or the elaborate loop Michael Philip came up with for John Barbour. While the arrangements for these songs were already well underway when these ideas were added, they are like icing on the cake. Years later, the songs sound wrong without them.
The Janelle album presented some interesting challenges. Her material consisted of a collection of 50 or so instrumentals, a mix of jigs, reels, waltzes, strathspeys and other tunes, plus one song. She had written some of the material, and the rest came from her Acadian tradition. Though she has classical training, Janelle comes from a strong and vibrant French musical world that has its own rules and language, one similar and also quite different from my own Newfoundland tradition. Janelle is also high school student, so I would have to do the tracking in a studio in Moncton, near her home, and I would not have access to all the high end gear GBS owns. With the exception of the two musicians I brought in, the other participants were Francophones, and we would have to communicate as best we could with my limited French, and their English. While my French is up to ordering a meal or renting a car, studio jargon and detailed musical directions are way beyond me.
As it turned out, the experience was wonderful. The musicians were energetic and enthusiastic, and easily overcame any language problems. Very quickly we were able to create the skeletons of arrangements. Her guitarist Nicolas Basques had a great feel for the tradition, without being bound stylistically. Due to the situation, we had to add drums, bass and everything else after we recorded the lead tracks, which is not ideal. However, Janelle and Nicolas played so well it hardly mattered.
My two favourite tracks are, ironically, the two with which I had the least input as a producer. One of the sets Janelle originally wanted to record consisted of a waltz, Laura's. While it was a pretty tune, I did not think it would be interesting enough for three minutes. I suggested she combine it with a French Newfoundland waltz I knew named Le Velours De Lan Vent, and tag on one of her jigs at the end for a change of pace. When we sat down to rehearse it, she surprised me by altering the original keys in a unique way. As a classically trained fiddler, she does not think in terms of the narrow key choices most traditional players stick to. The result was something delicate, full of space and air. Then we added some subtle guitar, and a little percussion. Back in St. John's, I played a little whistle on the end. Finished.
The set Marche Des Orages/Djable/Angus Campbell consists of what I would call a slow march, followed by an Acadian tune from Memramcook and a fast Cape Breton reel. I asked Janelle to slow down the first tune, and then try to speed up on the second, and increase the tempo again for the third tune. This sort of thing is hard for any player. And to do the bed properly, Nicolas the guitarist would have to speed up in lock step with her, pushing the tempo sometimes, and being pulled along at others. Each of the tunes would need to sit in its own rhythmic world, not too fast, not too slow. The increases would have to be completely natural, something you would hardly notice. It was asking a lot of both of them. We could have printed a click track, but all good instrumentals need to contain that elusive quality players call ‘lift'. ‘Lift' is the catchy and organic rhythm that dancers love. It is hard to describe, harder to pull off, and playing to a click track will almost certainly ruin it.
We recorded the supposedly rough bed track early on a weekday morning, as Janelle had to return to school for an exam later on in the day. We ran through it once to make sure both the musicians had the changes, adjusted the mics, and then did it for real. Janelle played the first tune flawlessly, and Nicolas had nailed exactly the blend of space and texture I was looking for. When the first acceleration came, he was in perfect synch with Janelle, even though they were playing in different rooms, only linked by headphones. By the time they got to the third (and hardest) tempo increase, me and the engineer John were grinning at each other in astonishment as they both slid into it like they had been playing it together for years. The tune finishes with an extremely difficult series of 16th notes, the sort of thing that only sounds good if it is played with incredible accuracy. The guitar had to sit in the narrow spaces between those lightening notes, and I could not believe that they played that part flawlessly, and then finished with aplomb. After John and I listened, we both agreed that it would be pointless to take another run at it. Neither of us could find a thing to criticize. In one take, they had both nailed it.
One of the hardest things to do as a producer is to know when to stop. There is always another texture, another instrument, another idea that would somehow make it better. On in the days that followed, the musicians would often ask me when we were going to start adding other tracks to the Marche set. I ran through dozens of ideas, but in the end, they always seemed extraneous. I am glad I resisted the urge to tamper with it. The track consists of one fiddle and one guitar, and to me it sounds as big as Metallica, and just as exciting. Sometimes, to be a good producer you just have to shut up and let the musicians' art shine through.
www.janelledupuis.com