Week 4 - Friday 4/05/1991

Recording Existential Past, Greenberg loses all hope

Existential Past begins with arpeggiated guitar parts playing for four measures. A snare roll lasting the duration of the fourth measure leads into the drum beat. Winegar and I tried countless times to play the guitar riffs through the snare roll and end up perfectly in tempo with the drum beat, yet each attempt was unsuccessful. Wallace realized that the drum roll was slightly out of sync with the click track, so he overdubbed a slightly modified click track to give us a solid beat to play against. That did the trick. Winegar spent the next hour overdubbing several acoustic guitars.

Gates, back from his stint as "Bob Cock" in a Primus video, returned to the studio at this time and listened to our work so far. He didn't like the bass sound (too weird) or the acoustic guitars (too wimpy and clear sounding). Gates disliked just about everything we had recorded in his absence. Unfazed, Winegar returned to the studio to overdub even more acoustic guitars in hopes of beefing up the sound. To address the issue of excessive clarity, Puig muted the electric guitar tracks. To fix the bass tone, he patched an EQ into the bass track's channel and dipped 9 dB of 800 Hz to reduce the honkiness of the tone that had bothered Gates. When the bass track seemed to vanish as a result of the change, he boosted 9 dB at 90 Hz to add some low end.

Berg and I wandered off the studio grounds while the tape machine was being repaired by a Studer technician. As we walked aimlessly through a residential neighborhood, I noticed how the smog had turned the sky orange. For the first time in the four weeks we had been in LA, I felt a sense of hopelessness descending around my shoulders like the filthy haze that stung my eyes.

Everything seemed to be going wrong. Gates and Winegar were in the throes of acute 'demo-itus' (a condition resulting from a band loving the demo version of a song so much that the 'real' recorded version can never live up to the excitement and intensity of the original). Wallace and Puig were showing signs of nervous fatigue. Berg was being edged out of the proceedings by Winegar. Urbano was growing increasingly frustrated by the lack of band unity. And I was on the verge of giving up entirely and going home. Only Peter, the seen-but-not-heard second engineer, was quietly going about his work, seemingly unaffected by the negative atmosphere in the control room.

Puig and I had a long talk when I returned to the studio which improved my mood considerably. Thanks, Puig.

The tape machine seemed to be working properly, so we continued with the session. Winegar doubled the acoustic guitar parts with Wallace's customized Telecaster plugged directly into Puig's Gibson amp, miked with two SM 57s and processed through the Fairchild 660 compressor. Once Gates approved of the beefed-up arpeggiated guitar part, Puig blended in the electric guitar part I had recorded earlier to balance the stereo soundstage.

Next, Berg overdubbed Hammond B3. Winegar and I asked him to resist playing the 3rds of any chord, as the harmonic ambiguity of root plus fifth in a 'pad' chord leaves room for the other instruments to establish the tonality directly. The tape machine malfunctioned at 7:20 P.M., signaling the end of the session.