Week 4 - Monday 4/01/1991

Recording Virginia's Dress.

I struggled to record the fretless bass part for Virginia's Dress, the goal being to reproduce Winegar's performance on the demo recording. After two hours of this, I asked Winegar if his hand had healed over the weekend. He replied that it had, so Wallace carefully cut away the cast and Winegar played the part without difficulty, much to our relief. To capture the instrument's characteristic growl, Puig attached a contact pickup to the headstock and blended its output with the direct and amplified signals. Urbano followed up by adding shaker and tambourine to the basic rhythmic track.

Gates wanted to record the ambient section that precedes the song's intro, so he manned the Mellotron, I sat at an old Hammond electronic chord organ, Berg played Hammond B3, Winegar tickled the piano ivories and Urbano switched channels on a miked television set. We improvised impressionistic noodlings over an A minor to D minor vamp for two takes, each clocking in around eight minutes in duration. Onto take two, we overdubbed a track from a cassette tape of Indian music. Puig adjusted the tape machine's speed during this overdub in order to match the Indian music's pitch to that of our improvisation. We were satisfied with the results and called it a day at 7:40 P.M.