No Part Of Bluegrass

05.05.2006- CST

"Boy, that ain't no part of bluegrass...that ain't no part of NOTHIN'!"

-- Bill Monroe
========

The first song we recorded for our CD was "Lost In The Silence," which was also the first song Brandi and I wrote together, which is what set the stage for the Dixie Bee Liners. After completing the song we decided on the spot to form this band, and it sort of set the tone for where we wanted to go with it, so it has a lot of meaning for us... hopefully, eventually, a lot of RESIDUALS for us as well, BWA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAA!

Click here to listen to LOST IN THE SILENCE
(c) & (p) 2002 Hart-Woodward, Betty Troublesome Music (ASCAP)
Brandi Hart: vocals, Nashville guitar
Buddy Woodward: mandolin, banjo, lead guitar, snare drum
Danny Weiss: guitar
Andy Cotton: upright bass
Bob Mastro: fiddle

Brandi is going to kill me unless I also include a more flattering picture of her...unfortunately this is not one of them, but it is a great one of the goat:

I may be writing to you from a hospital bed next week. Hopefully this one will make up for my trespasses:

She's very cute in this one. And I seem to be attempting to suck my head down into my body cavity like a turtle. Don't try this at home.

Brandi had the basic idea for the song (inspired by a trip we took down to a shady creek one afternoon at the Grey Fox Bluegrass festival), lyrics, and melody. I helped her flesh out the chords and did the arrangement, which is more or less how we have continued to write songs together, though we have switched it around on several occasions. Whatever feels right at the time.

Speaking of songwriting, we all get into our own little ruts and occasional bouts of writer's block that can be incredibly demoralizing and frustrating. Obviously music is a profession and a "business," but it should also be fun. I've found the best way to get past those blocks is by making a game out of it. Here's one game I came up with, which I used with my old band The Ghost Rockets: I cut three strips of paper, on one I wrote "chords," on another I wrote "melody," and on the third "lyrics." I put them in a hat, shook 'em up, had myself and two of my band mates each take a slip out of the hat. If you picked the "chords" slip you had to come up with the chords, the guy with the "melody" slip put the melody over those chords, and the last guy came up with the lyrics. Of course there was also a good deal of cross-pollination. We all helped each other out, and I ended up doing the final polishing of the song, but it helped break the log-jam, and we got a great song out of it ("Family Tree," which the Bee Liners cut on our CD).

To that end Brandi and I keep a large terracotta flower pot in the bedroom, and every time one of us comes up with an interesting phrase or idea -- or if one of us sees an interesting headline in a supermarket tabloid (one of the best sources for song ideas, try it some time) -- we'll write it down on a post-it note and put it in the pot. Periodically we pull them all out, arrange them on the bed, and more often than not it inspires a new song. The point is to keep it fresh, fun, and exciting, and remove all pressure (self-imposed or otherwise) from the process.

Getting back to "Lost In The Silence," we recorded the song sitting in a circle at Spatula Ranch: Danny on lead guitar, Andy Cotton on upright bass, Brandi on Nashville guitar (more on that below), and me on mandolin (once again with the RCA ribbon mic). Since I played the solo opening rhythm guitar figure myself I had to dub that in later. We didn't use a click track on this song because we wanted it to "breathe," so I chopped mandolin over the opening, which we later muted when mixing.

Recording mandolin at Spatula Ranch using an RCA 74-B "Junior Velocity" ribbon mic

I also overdubbed banjo and the guitar solo myself. Fiddler Bob Mastro came in a week later. We cut his part, using a large diaphragm condenser as an overhead (set on hypercardioid so I'd get some room ambience) and a small "lipstick" condenser on the back of the fiddle. Yes, the back...

I read an interview once in Frets magazine with super session musician and Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan, where he said that there's a lot of sound that comes from the BACK of the fiddle, so I thought I'd give it a try... You know what? It does have an interesting sound: very "woody" with almost kind of a nasal quality. It wasn't suitable for every track, but we did mix it in for a couple songs, including this one.

"Nashville guitar" (aka "Nashville tuning," or "high-stringing"), in case you didn't know, is a way to create sort of a twelve-string effect on a six-string guitar. The simplest way to explain it is, you use the high octave strings of a twelve-string set of strings on a six-string guitar. The first two strings of your instrument (high E & B) remain unchanged, the lower four strings (G through low E) are tuned an octave above standard tuning. In order to do this, you have to use lighter-gauged strings. It's possible to buy ready-made string sets for Nashville tuning, but they can be hard to find. You could buy a twelve-string set and just use the octave or thin strings, but that's kind of expensive and wasteful. Probably the best way for you would be to buy the strings individually from your local music store's single-string bin. The gauges we use are (high to low): .011, .014, .010, .014, .020w, and .024w (all strings are unwound except for the low E).

We've found that it works best on a small-bodied guitar, something about the size of one of those old Gibson LG guitars (check out the Gibson Blues King, which is similar to the LG). You may have heard it on "Angie" by the Rolling Stones, but probably the most famous use of Nashville tuning is on the intro of "Hotel California" by the Eagles...that ain't no part of bluegrass, to quote ol' Big Mon, but you get the idea. It used to be fairly common in the 60s and early 70s on bluegrass recordings by Jim & Jesse, Flatt & Scruggs, the Dillards, and a few others, but has sort of fallen out of favor for some reason. It's a cool texture when used judiciously, and we're happy to bring it back into the mix. I used a dynamic mic on the Nashville guitar so the highs wouldn't be TOO "sparkly," and a touch of compression. Of course we could've done that with EQ and processing in the mixing stage, but I try to do as little "fix it in the mix" as possible. I like to get the sounds we want "on tape" as close as possible to the final product.

OK, that last sentance was gramatically retarded, but you get the picture.

After playing the song for a couple years we've changed it a little along the way, and we recently re-recorded the song in a completely new arrangement in Arkansas for what we hope will be our next CD on a major label, but here is the original track. Give it a listen and see what you think.

Next week I'll take a complete detour and tell you about "Man of Constant Sorrow," the show I'm doing at the Barter State Theatre of Virginia, about bluegrass pioneers the Stanley Brothers. I play a member of their band, as well as a couple of other minor roles. ...

an episode I like to call THE VOLUPTUOUS HORROR OF HAIR POMADE.

Talk atcha again soon...

bw