The Broken Telegraph

Photo credit: The Broken Telegraph

by Ian Ebright

J.R. Richards and engineer Michael C. Ross are huddled in front of the Boomerang in Studio B. The song ‘Clearwater’ is booming from the speakers on top of the massive console and generating puffs of air that are blowing past my arms intermittently. Richards is in the zone; he’s leaning on his elbows and listening with intent.  

We’re in the middle of a 12 hour day at RadioStar Studios; just one leg of a two week mixing marathon. When Richards tells me that the session days usually run from 10AM until 10 at night, I wonder if he’s trying to brace himself for the worst. He’s not. Each day begins in the studio at 10 in the morning and ends nearly 12 hours later.

As for the routine, it goes something like this: everything starts on Richards’ computer. His beefy Mac has all of the pieces from the live recording sessions (which were engineered by Steve Churchyard and feature drummer Kenny Aronoff, guitarists Phil X and Rusty Anderson and bassist Chris Cheney). The entire collection of works have been sorted on the computer with meticulous detail, and that’s not all: “I have a backup copy in my sock drawer at home” he assures me. If that sounds like a lot of data- it is. One song alone has vocal and instrumental files totaling roughly eight gigabytes. Half of that are the drum tracks alone. And that computer is serious business. It has a one terabyte hard drive, and Richards has brought along an external drive with a second terabyte of storage.

Richards’ equipment is set up in the third-story lounge (which was the former theater’s projection booth, and shares a wall with Studio B). He uploads all eight gigs of song data to a file transfer site which Ross then accesses to download onto the computer in Studio B. From there, the engineer sets out to build a memorable song from a vault’s worth of digital fragments.

Ross is left alone to make his own interpretation of the pieces, and accomplishes this by building the song coherantly while accentuating certain sounds and fading others. I have just drastically simplified the task at hand, but you get the idea. It’s not until Ross opens the studio door and lets us in for an audio preview that the verbal feedback begins. Just one suggestion from Richards can take hours to correct, so much of the day is spent waiting. Richards, musician Ryan Rossi and I pass the time playing pool and ‘Rainbow Six’ on Xbox 360.

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Looking across The Boomerang in Studio B. Photo credit: The Broken Telegraph

Richards and Ross haven’t done this together in the past, so there’s a creative tug-of-war at work, but nothing that you’d call unprofessional.  Though it can be cumbersome when two individuals have different styles and sensibilities, it’s also propelling these songs to an even better place. Hitting a stride in tandem is no small task. It’s a process of defending a personal creative vision while welcoming the unexpected, which in this case is made easier by the personable and disarming nature of Richards, and Ross’ welcoming sense of humor.  Both men have an incredible work ethic too, and I only know that because I must have heard the lyric “so deep that we can all come clean” hundreds of times as ‘Clearwater’ was being perfected. Richards prefers this give and take. While the two work to find a point of balance, he is grateful to have another opinion, and an expert one at that.

Eventually the ‘Clearwater’ production reaches a stopping point. After the third or fourth preview of the day, Ross offers a suggestion that allows the whole room to breathe a little easier: “How about a car test?”

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Photo credit: The Broken Telegraph

It’s night time now, and after a long day of steady work, the track is finally burned to a CD. It will now be analyzed in Richards’ BMW on our way to a late dinner. All the production in the world doesn’t matter if a song sounds shallow on a typical four speaker setup. The car test is a must.

Over dinner at a nearby Mexican restaurant, Ross and Richards discuss the day’s collaboration like a couple of old friends. It’s business for two guys who know their field like few others, but there’s also a willing sense of discovery at work. It takes some friction and persistence to break through to that place where art exists.

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Click here for J.R. Richards’ Myspace profile.