Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Motion Occupies Music

Assistant Engineer at Automated Sound Studios
1500 Broadway (43rd St)

Used to practice my mixing with the Grateful Dead master tapes for Terrapin Station. Just thinking about that now I realize just how many people had the opportunity to “practice” using Grateful Dead masters? What a hoot.

Automated was brand new beautiful state of the art recording facility in the heart of Times Square. I found out they were staffing the studio from a friend. I was working at Ogilvy and Mather at the time as an AV tech doing casting sessions, and attending NYU part time. To get the job at Automated I had to “try out.” We were trained over the July 4th weekend and then tested. I guess I passed. I was the only female hired along with two males. Vicky Fabry, the head asst. and 3rd engineer, who came from A&R recording, trained us all.

It was Automated where I worked with some of the most amazing musicians and engineers in the world. I was assigned to assist Elliot Scheiner, a guest engineer who was coming to work at Automated for the first time. I was told that the session must run flawlessly. (No pressure.) I was young, shy, but ready to roll. When Elliot showed up he did a monitor check and there I was hearing the latest mixes he had just completed and they were the masters from the soon to be released:

"Aja is an album by the rock band Steely Dan. The album was named after the Korean wife of group co-founder Donald Fagen's friend's brother. Originally released in 1977, it became the group's best-selling album. Topping at #3 on the U.S. charts and #5 in the United Kingdom, it was the band's first platinum album, eventually going platinum twice. In July 1978, the album won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Recording. It has sold over 20 million copies worldwide. In 2003, the album was ranked number 145 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
The album is considered quite ambitious and sophisticated, and features several leading session musicians. The eight-minute-long title track features complex jazz-based changes and a solo by renowned saxophonist Wayne Shorter, as well as dextrous drumming by Steve Gadd - most notably at the end of the tune.
Aja is also the subject of one of the Classic Albums series of documentaries about the making of famous albums. The documentary includes a song-by-song study of the album (the only omission being "I Got the News," which is played during the closing credits), interviews with Steely Dan co-founders Walter Becker and Fagen (among others) plus new, live-in-studio versions of songs from the album, and the opportunity to hear some of the rejected (and uncredited) guitar solos for "Peg," before Jay Graydon produced the satisfactory take.
The album is also one of the only Steely Dan titles not available in a 5.1 version on any high-resolution audio format. When DTS attempted to make a 5.1 version, it was discovered that the multitrack masters for both "Black Cow" and the title track had gone missing. For this same reason, a multichannel SACD version was cancelled by Universal Music. Donald Fagen has offered a reward for the missing masters or any information that leads to their recovery." (Wikipedia)

M.O.M. 2

No comments: