Answers to Questions

Congratulations to Cousin Seattle for staying all 13 innings. You are now in the Official Great Plotnik Hall of Fame, Plotzer Division.

Tough Bird isn't the only one who has questions to ask about why Plotnik is in the recording studio, recording people 25 years after they already recorded the same thing? The simple answer is: Because we can. Technology has made the impossible possible.

For example, Blurt and Mull's musical "The Perfect Pitch" was first recorded in 1983 on an 8-track tape recorder. This means you had eight tracks, or bands along the 1/4" recording tape, into which you had to record everything you needed. Guitar went on track one, bass on track two, etc. There were eight tracks and eight tracks only.

If you thought of something new to add after you were finished, too bad. No room. Unless you were Blurt, who was also recording engineer at the time.

If Blurt wanted to add another guitar part at 3:50 of the song, he just found a track where nobody was playing at that exact moment, and he recorded the guitar part there. If the singer was on Track Four and she took a breath from 1:45 - 1:48, this meant that Track Four had three empty seconds where Blurt could record the sound of a fire engine.

If you've never been there, you won't understand how impossibly difficult and frustrating this made the next step in the process: mixdown. When you were done recording, you had to make a final copy, or mixdown, of everything you had recorded, and everything had to be placed at the right volume, and equalization, and the reverbs had to come in at the right time and go out at the right time, and a million other things had to be added or subtracted, and humans had to do it. There was no computer mixdown available then to poor songwriters in Hollywood working in the producer's second bedroom.

Also, the only place to work on mixdown was in the corner of that room, surrounded by thirty keyboards, cat hair, a million cables connecting everything to everything else (and two of those cables were not working at all times, and you never knew which two), ash trays, old pizza boxes, crumpled up sports sections and at least four people, each trying to coordinate both arms to punch volume sliders and teensy weensy on/off/in/out buttons, louder, softer, back in and back out, on a mixing console that was only a foot and a half wide.

This would have been only mildly impossible if Track Four had just carried the Lead Vocal. But Track Four now had Lead Vocal, Fire Engine, Third Guitar Part, back to Lead Vocal, a sour background vocal that had to be muted out at exactly 4:02, but then unmuted before the Lead Vocal came back in at 4:03, a five second overdub by Hy Tek Browne which needed LOTS of reverb that immediately preceded a bass clarinet phrase which couldn't have ANY reverb. Just those five seconds required four button pushes. And the buttons sometimes stuck.

EVERY track had this many sound pieces on them, all of which had to be brought in or taken out perfectly, no stopping, from start to finish, and if any of the four young men, each controlling one track with each hand, made the slightest mistake, he screamed SHITTTTTT!!!! and the whole take was ruined and you had to start over. Add it up and you get eight rank and skanky underarms after sixteen hours.

Is anyone now understanding why Plotnik finished working on The Perfect Pitch in 1983 and didn't want to even THINK about it again until 2008?

Technology, Tough Bird, has changed everything. There are no longer eight tracks, there are infinite tracks. As many as you need. The computer mixes it all down for you afterwards. Technology once out of the reach of all pockets but the deepest, now costs pennies. Everyone can do it. And there is air conditioning. And fifty year olds take more showers than twenty year olds.

BOTTOM LINE: You still need great songs. You still need great songs. You still need great songs. Thank God.