We recorded Beautiful Empty with my good friend John Macy at his fabulously relaxed and beautiful sounding studio, Macy Sound Studios. 
Anyway, I've known John for a long time... and one of the many things I love about him is his uncanny ability to drop the perfectly hilarious phrase at the right moment. Below are a list of things I heard John during the course of tracking and mixing Beautiful Empty. (In typical Macy fashion, he gave other people credit for a lot of these... but to me, they're Macy's sayings.)
As a side note, during the making of Beautiful Empty John and I invented what is quite possibly the most perfect studio drink ever created: The Jameson Slushy. Invented might be the wrong word. Maybe we just chanced upon it... perhaps it was merely a discovery. Maybe it always existed out there, lurking in the mysterious ether, waiting to be found. But we found it.
THE JAMESON SLUSHY
Directions:
Find a tall, relatively clean glass.
Fill it with Sonic Ice. (Yes -- a bag of ice you drove to buy from Sonic. It's a bag of impossibly round little snowy ice balls that melt at the perfect rate. Just trust me.)
Fill glass with Sonic Ice.
Crack open a fresh bottle of Jameson.
Pour until the elixir is 1/8" from glass rim.
Dive in.
Now get back to work.
John Macy's Studio Sayings
- "Well that wasn't far from close."
- "Let's punch in at bar 1."
- "Everything sounded good up until bar one."
- "Other than style and delivery, that was a great take."
- "Is the click speeding up?"
- "Anything other than a major chord is a 'shit chord'." (this is from a country legend, he says)
- "The trick is to go for spontaneity. No matter how long it takes."
- "Music is about selling emotion. And there's no emotion on a grid." -- Michael Wagner, metal producer as channeled by Macy
- "Perfect equates to shit." Cowboy Jack Clement as channeled by Macy
- "The three R's of recording: reflect, repent and reboot."
- "That's right out of the book of wrong." from Michael Rhodes (bass player) or "That sounds like it's been sauteed up in a bunch of wrong sauce."
- "That guy lives in his own world... and it's not crowded. - Michael Rhodes
- "i just found this new signal path for a harsh vocal. it's like pouring cream all over it man."
- "I play bad, but my tone is terrible...."
- "Sounded great right up to where you started playing..."
- "Hey, i'm slow but I do poor work...."
- "You count it in and I'll meet you at the fade."
- "This mix is getting gooshy and cool."
There are many, many, many more. These are just the ones I was able to write down. Please comment and add your own favorite studio sayings!
~John Common
July 25th, 2010 10:56 pm
Ha! These are great. We've been keeping a notebook of studio hilarity too, so fun to go back & try to guess what inspired some of the most absurd quotes!
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