“Tiger Prints” Demo

We have a demo of “Tiger Prints” up at Bandcamp now, free to hear and/or download. Link below….

The lyrics are about a roadtrip I took earlier this year and are posted with the song. The music came about, as it often does with me, from an open tuning. In this case, I’d tuned a guitar to G or “Spanish” tuning, as they used to call it: an oldtime set-up employed by artists like Charley Patton. The guitar itself is tuned not to G, but somewhere around a Db. That’s just where the song ended up. I don’t worry too much about details like that. Songs find their own tempos and tunings and I follow along. As Frank Sinatra remarked, during a session for his landmark album with Antonio Carlos Jobim, “No, it’s a good tempo. It’s the only way you can do it. You have to hang with it.”

To record “Tiger Prints,” I took the guitar and a digital handheld into my kids’ bathroom and performed the song straight through. I set the mic a couple feet in front of me, about mid-level between the guitar and my mouth. I didn’t test anything. I just played it as I thought it should sound. There’s something about recording a song in mono and one take that I love. Most of the work that really influenced me was recorded at fields, porches, store fronts, street corners, hotel rooms, festivals. It’s more heartfelt, spontaneous, intimate and alive than anything you hear on the radio these days.

Once I had the basic track, I sent it to Janelle Rene out in CA. A friend of hers, Derek Jablonski, helped record the back-up vocals. I suggested a single delicate harmony and that’s exactly what she delivered. My wife, who inspired the song, thought it was beautiful. I mixed the two tracks, adding the slightest possible echo to Janelle’s voice to offset mine, which was so clipped and dry, then rendered it in three different audio formats (Myspace uses mp3’s, Bandcamp prefers wav or flac).

Next up, I think I’ll try a more upbeat song, adding drums to the acoustic guitar (still no individual mics on anything). Driving music. I’m hoping it will have something of that 1950’s Sun Records feel to it.

Here’s a link to the “Tiger Prints” demo….

TIGER PRINTS

Feedback is welcomed and you can find us at facebook, myspace and katharinehepcat@gmail.com .

–Walter