48 hours.
This weekend we're meeting up in NYC to start work on a new Plink record. We're going in pretty blind, with only sketches of songs, but that's on purpose. We're approaching this record differently. The first one was painstakingly sculpted out of digital bits; this time we're aiming to be less calculating, to learn some lessons from the year we spent playing live Plink songs. So we have a few friends talked into working with us for the weekend, we're shelling out real cash for real studio time, and hopefully we'll walk out with a lot of good raw material.
We have two days to work, then our real lives get us back. I figure I'll sleep about three hours all weekend so we can get the most out of what we have. And as usual, halfway through, blearily eating burritos and listening to playbacks, I know we'll say "if we had two weeks... could you imagine?"
Right, so the other day I read this Nine Inch Nails interview. It's an awful piece of starfucker crap (he's a virtuoso at the drum pads! he can tune a bass in under a minute!), but... still... can't stop looking....
"Next, I'm going to do a bass track and I think I'm going to use these three pedals..." Reznor speaks out loud the names of the pedals, and as he turns to his rack full of basses, picks one up and tunes it, the pedals almost magically appear before him, hooked up by his highly efficient studio assistant.
This is what Plink needs! Modular synths and tanning beds!
I remember reading articles about Metallica recording And Justice For All. They spent weeks -- like, many weeks -- getting guitar sounds. What?
We've always had to work like lunatics in two or three days. Thanks to the magic of The Modern Home Studio, we can take weeks to mix or whatever, but "time spent in the same room" is a luxury we rarely get. It's only gotten worse as we've gotten older.
So if you're wondering why it takes so long for Wordclock to accomplish anything, this is probably why. Blame our strict insistence on keeping it real.
There's a Tape Op interview with John Tchicai where they ask him about making Coltrane's Ascension. In response to the question "how long did it take to make the record?", Tchicai's answer starts with "well, I think we showed up at the studio around 11 am..."