My old friend Kole Hansen is somewhere in the air above… I dunno, probably New Jersey, as I type this. She’s flying across the country to inaugurate my home studio with a dozen of her finest tunes.

I met Kole at some shitty gig in Washington, DC about eight years ago. I was playing with the rapidly-disintegrating Collider; she was doing a solo acoustic thing. Why we were on the same bill is a mystery only my old manager can explain (and we’d probably come away confused even then). But Kole and I hit it off and agreed to work together sometime in the future. It’s sometime in the future, right?

We’ve got two weeks to record, so let’s see how far we get. It looks like Kole is gonna keep some kind of video diary; I’ll embed it here with some notes of my own. Installment one:

I’m no recording engineer, but over the years I’ve accumulated a shitload of studio gear. At this point, many elements of recordmaking are just easier and cheaper for me to do at home, and I’ve farted around enough studios to know how to do them. My ears are far from golden, and I don’t think I’ll ever wrap my head around the mathematical nuts and bolts of EQ and signal processing, but there was a time when I needed to hire an engineer just to edit Pro Tools tracks – correct timing and tune vocals – stuff I can now handle on my own.

My home studio isn’t much to look at. It’s built to do the things I feel comfortable working on my myself – especially synth programming. For that, I can’t think of anyplace better. I’ve got a ton of software synths and nine hardware units, all hooked up and ready to roll with 16 dedicated MIDI tracks apiece. I can stack sounds to the heavens.

Many of my early recordings were done entirely in the synthesizer – I just dumped the sequences right to tape and sang over them. The problem with that stuff is that it’s from the dawn of sampling, when the sounds just weren’t all that great. Drum machines sounded like drum machines. Fake piano, bass, strings and horns sounded like fake piano, bass, strings and horns. That’s not really the case now – technology has improved to the point where it’s very difficult to tell a canned instrument from the genuine article – but I grew to hate the sound of my old sample-based records so much that I still have an aversion to leaving samples of acoustic instruments in my final mixes. I’ll arrange and demo with the synthesizer, but it gets replaced by the real thing pretty quick. That usually requires a trip to a real studio.

In my opinion, drums have to be recorded someplace decent, by an engineer who knows what he’s doing. Most other instruments, though, can be tracked anywhere. I’ve worked with guitarists, bass players, percussionists, even horn and string players, who have gotten excellent results recording at home. I don’t own a piano, organ or electric piano, so I’ll pop in to a studio to record those – but if I did, I probably would track them myself. A good bit of the organ, Wurlitzer piano and harpsichord on The Cutting Room Floor were recorded at Brian Dewan’s apartment and they sound great.

A good mix engineer can handily bail out a lousy recording engineer or mediocre tracking environment. Some of the Amy Willey stuff I sent to The Jarv recently was a nightmare – Willey’s voice and guitar were recorded into a Korg Trinity keyboard in 1997. Think about that: they were recorded on a keyboard. (The Trinity was the keyboard of the future for a future that never came.) Yet he managed to get those nasty tracks playing nice with the properly-recorded rhythm tracks we added years later. Tony Doogan was able to work miracles with the sonic garbage we handed him for The Cutting Room Floor. A lot of that was recorded on a cassette Portastudio.

This stuff is on my mind because my friend Nicole Hansen is coming to town for two weeks and we’re gonna try to make her a 12-song record. It’s a bit of a whirlwind affair, and I’m scrambling to figure out what I can realistically do in my home studio, what needs to be done elsewhere and who will do it. Today I traded in my one redundant keyboard for a set of new monitor speakers and a shitload of cables.

I think a lot of this stuff can be done with the synths I have at my disposal here, provided I can get over my issues with sampled acoustic instruments. The budget is microscopic, so I’ve got to make wise use of what funds there are. I’ll do whatever it takes… Kole is the kind of person who would spend her last dime making a record. She’s just fuckin got to do it. But she never goes begging. I can get behind that.

Last summer, two magazines I was designing folded simultaneously and I found myself with some extra time on my hands. I took the opportunity to hit the road with three of my favorite musicians: Reeves Gabrels, Mike Keaney and Matt Johnson. We drove west to St. Paul, south to Lenexa, Kansas, and then back home, stopping along the way at anyplace that would have us. And we hit as many Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives locations as we could find on the route.

It was a blast, and every show was captured on my trusty digital stereo recorder. A couple were even multitracked by the venue. When we got home, I collated representative tunes from each show into an audio souvenir of the tour. Dave McNair did a stunning job massaging takes from different rooms and sound systems into one smooth set, and the result is CELEBRATION PARTY!, which came out today at iTunes, Amazon, and every other such digital retailer.

You can listen to the album in its entirety right here at the Song Foundry, of course – and also purchase the download in a package with one of the silkscreened posters from the tour if you like. Reeves and I signed and numbered 50 of the posters, which I gotta say look awesome. I drew the poster in crayon (after the work of Kazunari Hattori), and then the great Kayrock of Brooklyn printed up a sweet batch.

Here’s video of “We Wait And We Wait” from the tour’s first stop, in Pittsburgh, PA.