With Troy was Alicia Hernandez, the twenty-four year old audio technician who had been assigned to work on the project as the Nerdlys’ assistant. She was a chubby, short woman with tremendous breasts and a pretty face. Though short on experience as well, she was a whiz with the digital software of the studio and had a good ear for the sound characteristics of the studio and the isolation rooms attached to it. She also made a pretty good pot of coffee.
Everyone said their good mornings and then all but Laura hit the coffee station in the corner of the room, annihilating Alicia’s first pot. She was used to this by now and quickly went about constructing another one.
They spent about thirty minutes drinking their coffee and talking over the plan for the day. The plan was not all that complicated: they were going to continue laying down the bass and the drum tracks for Playing Those Games. Nobody was naïve enough to think that they were going to finish them today, not with the Nerdlys in charge.
Once the coffee was done, everyone pulled their instruments and headphones out of the storage room in the rear of the studio. Jake was working with the Brogan drop-D tuned guitar for this one. Celia was not playing any guitar at all on this track, as there was no need for a rhythm track. Laura was not involved in the piece either—in truth, there was really no reason for her to be involved at all while they were only laying down the rhythm tracks, even when they moved on to pieces that did feature the sax—but Jake and Celia had made the decision to keep her in the studio with them for all sessions, both so she could learn the process of recording and so they could maintain that camaraderie with her. True, this decision was costing them money, but what the hell? It was only money. It wasn’t like Pauline, Jill, and Greg—the financial Nazis who nitpicked every expense—actually knew that Laura wasn’t really needed.
In the center of the primary studio room, Ted’s drum set was assembled with a total of six microphones arrayed in strategic positions. Two hung from overhead and had been painstakingly positioned by the Nerdlys over a period of nearly two hours on their first day. There was a kick mic on the bass drum, one on each of the snares, and another on the tom drum. All of these were wired into the sound board and then into the recorder itself. The drums would be the only instrument that was actually heard in the studio for this session, as it was pretty much impossible to silently play percussion. Everyone else’s instruments would be heard only in the headphones to avoid having their output bleed over into the drum mics.
Sitting well back behind Ted, but within easy sightline of him, was Ben, who sat in a studio chair. His bass was in his lap, the output from it being recorded as well. This required his amplifier to be enclosed in one of the isolation rooms and then microphoned from there, with the output going through the soundboard and into the headphone sets. The decision to record the bass and the drums together had only been made after another agonizingly long and technical debate between the Nerdlys regarding the advantages and disadvantages of doing the rhythm instruments separately or together. Doing them together meant that whenever either one of them screwed up, or just didn’t play to the Nerdlys’ satisfaction for the take, the process needed to be stopped and restarted. Doing them separately would have taken longer, but would have meant that only an imperfection in the instrument being recorded would necessitate a stop.
Jake was just to the left of Ben, his Brogan wired into a set of effects pedals and an amplifier that was locked in a foam insulated isolation box, and microphoned in there. He was not being recorded, but Ben and Ted both needed to hear his notes to keep themselves tuned into what they were doing. He would play along with the tune but if he screwed up, the tune would go as long as his screwup did not cause either Ben or Ted to screw up in turn.
Cindy was to the rear of the studio. Since her electronic piano was digital, it was easy to wire her into the soundboard and keep the output from her instrument from permeating the room and interfering with the drum mics. Of all the musicians in the room, she was having the most difficult time adapting to this method of playing. She had never recorded before and listening to the music coming through the headphones instead of just hearing it through the air was foreign and distracting to her. That was why they had started with Playing Those Games. Her part in the tune was minimal. She played the opening melody during the first verse and then had only a few fill parts once Jake came in with his guitar and the tempo picked up. The hope was this would help her get used to the process.
Celia was closed into the other isolation room. She would hear the output of all the other instruments in her headphones and sing the lyrics to the song into her microphone. Again, she was not being recorded currently, was just there to provide her part of the song and keep the rhythm section locked in.
Laura, with nothing to do, sat in the control room with the Nerdlys, Troy, and Alicia, listening to everything through her own headphones and thinking to herself how complicated this all was. It was certainly a bit more than just trooping into the studio and laying down the tunes.
The first thing the Nerdlys did was sound check every single microphone and instrument individually, starting with the ones that were being recorded. Ted hit every drum in his set multiple times, one by one and then in succession, following Sharon’s directions as he heard her voice in his ears. They then moved onto Ben and his bass, having him adjust volumes on his instrument itself, having Alicia adjust volumes and levels on his amp, while she herself adjusted things on the soundboard while staring at the computer screen with its lines, graphs and dots. Just to get Ted and Ben dialed in to where they wanted them took the better part of forty minutes to accomplish.
They were not so anal with the rest of the instruments, but they were the Nerdlys, after all, and musical imperfection, even if it was not being recorded, offended them. Getting Jake’s guitar, Cindy’s piano, and Celia’s voice output at levels that complemented each other, and, most importantly, did not override the output of the instruments that did matter, took another twenty minutes.
“All right,” Sharon said at last. “Looks like we’re copacetic. You guys want to run through the piece once to plug yourselves in before we get started?”
They did. Cindy started them out, playing out the melody at eighty beats per minute on the piano. No one else chimed in just yet. She went through it three times and then Celia began to sing, her voice soft, mournful as she went through the first verse. When she got to the hook line at the beginning of the chorus: I’m so tired of ... playing those games ... everyone jumped in at once. The beat came up to 120, pounded out by Ted and supported by Ben. Jake began to hammer out the primary riff with classic rock and roll distortion. Celia sang the second verse out with more strength, with more anger and emotion.
They had not originally planned to perform Games (as they called it) in this fashion. As Celia had originally composed it, it was to be a ballad, sticking to the piano as the primary melodic instrument and keeping the tempo at 80 throughout. Mary would have played a secondary melody while Jake would have done nothing but provide a few fills on the in-betweens. Slowly, however, as they rehearsed it up, they all came to realize that it just wasn’t working that way. It was an angry, heartfelt tune and the slow beat of it mixed with the mellow, almost orchestral melody of the instruments contrasted a little too much with the emotion.