Sophie's Encore (8 page)

Dan laughed. “That would be cool. I’d love to teach you.” He eyed me critically. “And you do look like a student. All you need is the—”

“Glasses?” I cut in, whipping my brand new pair of reading glasses out of my handbag and putting them on. I lowered my head so I could ogle him over my half-lenses.

Dan gave a belly laugh. “Now you look like a 1950’s secretary,” he chuckled. “What I was going to say was you need a pen stuck behind your ear.”

He took the biro out of my hand and slid it behind my right ear. “Like so. There, now you totally look the part.”

“Oh.” I took my glasses off again, embarrassed. The touch of his fingers sent tingles down my arm, and I was startled by my reaction to an innocuous little gesture. Dan was oblivious. He took the glasses from me and put them back on my nose.

“Don’t take them off. I like them.” He looked at me with interest, as one might examine an exotic beetle. “When did you get these?”

“A couple of months ago, when I kept getting headaches. They’re only for close work and I don’t need them now.” I swept them off my nose and dropped them into their case and back into my handbag before Dan could interfere again.

He chuckled. “I think they’re very cute,” he reiterated but I didn’t take the bait.

“Shall we get on with it?” I suggested a little brusquely instead, snapping Dan out of his silly mood.

“Okay, yes, of course,” he agreed and led the way downstairs.

He played me the song we had worked on the previous day, and the difference was astounding. “I took your ideas and our work to the studio yesterday afternoon and had our sound man master it properly. It’s not finished,” he hastened to add. “It needs more work, but I wanted to show you exactly what mastering accomplishes.”

“It’s amazing,” I agreed, totally intrigued by the change. “So what did you have in mind? What is it we’re doing here, and how does it fit in with the overall recording of this new album?”

This thought had been bugging me all night. We were working in Dan’s home studio, and I knew the songs would be mixed and mastered in a ‘proper’ studio for eventual mass production. I had wondered how our morning session would fit in.

Dan stopped the music and sat back in his chair.

“This is a critical part of the process. I always take home a copy of our raw material to play and experiment with, and Darren does the same. Sometimes Mick or Joe might pop in, or we might all work together. We mock something up, like a demo, and then we take it into the professional studio to talk through with our sound man there. He will do the mixing and mastering on his master files and add his own magic touch, too.” He grinned at me.

“Every sound engineer has a certain touch. Our man, Richard, has golden ears, and he’s worked with us for years, as you know. When all is said and done, and the band and I are at the end of the road with our suggestions and tweaks, Richard will sprinkle stardust all over the album. That’s the art of sound engineering. That’s the bit you can’t teach, and can’t learn. You’ve either got it, or you don’t.”

He hesitated. “I think you might have it. You blew me away yesterday. And I want to find out how far we can take you. So…” He turned to the mixing console and retrieved a stack of small USB flash drives, fanning them out on the desk in front of us.

“There are all the tracks. Richard has put them onto flash drives, one each, as a project that I can put on my DAW to play with and—”

“Your what?” I interrupted.

“Sorry,” Dan said. “Please stop me if I talk jargon. DAW is short for Digital Audio Workstation, which is what we have here. My home studio.”

I picked up one of the flash drives, a little black memory stick with a USB port at the end. “This contains a song, yeah?”

“This contains a song,” Dan confirmed. “Richard made a copy of the raw material so I can work on it here, and when we’re done, we’ll put it back on the flash drive and I’ll take it into the studio.”

I nodded, and Dan continued. “I’d like us… I’d like
you
to work on a song each morning, maybe the same one for a few days, until you’ve figured out how you like it. Eventually, I’d love for you to come into the proper studio and watch Richard do his thing, but one step at a time. I can teach you the basics here. It’s probably best if we start with mixing before I walk you through mastering. We have plenty of raw material to work with.” He rubbed his hands, while I felt a little overwhelmed.

“Give it to me in bite-size chunks,” I pleaded. “I’m no technophobe, but I feel completely out of my depth here. It’s like learning a new language.”

“It is,” Dan concurred. “Or perhaps like learning a new instrument. And I will try to make it bite-size. Simply ask if it gets too much or if I move too fast.”

Thus we set to work. Dan picked one of the songs—project number six, a song called
White Poison
—and had me play association bingo. “What do you expect of a song with this title?” he prompted for my input.

“White poison,” I mused. “That sounds like drugs.” Dan gave me a thumbs up. “I’m thinking this could be a hard, gritty piece with shrill guitars and a throbbing base, like a hangover headache. Or it could be a sad ballad, a mellow piece with acoustic guitars. Depends on what happens, I guess, and whether someone’s died.”

Dan grimaced. “You have a lyrical way of putting things, but yes, you’re right. D’you know,” he cut into his own thoughts, “it’s quite interesting to get a female take on this. You have a different way of looking at things. This will be a great experience.”

He pressed play, and it turned out my initial instinct had been spot on. It was a fast piece with loud drums, heavy on the cymbals and bass, and a racing guitar line.

“What do you think of the mix?”

I waggled my head. “It’s better than yesterday’s but…”

“Yes? Go on, speak your mind. Whatever comes into your head. You have to go with your instinct here.”

I took the plunge. “I think it’s too mushy. If you’re singing about drug abuse, I want to hear a thumping heartbeat. I want the adrenaline, but it needs to start clear and become fuzzy later. You know, alter the quality of the sound through the song so that it does become oppressive and hurtful. Actually…” I paused. “Let me listen to the whole thing first to see where you’re taking it and
then
let me think some more.”

Dan smiled widely. “I love you,” he said sincerely. “I love your style and your honesty. This will be a great partnership.”

I blushed at the compliment but smiled back. Dan seemed to value my opinion. Never mind that I was a complete rookie. I had always dreamed of making music. But I didn’t play an instrument that would be useful in a rock band, and while I had tried singing, my talent wasn’t tremendous. Yet if I could make music
great
in this way, that would be a wonderful achievement. I would do skillful, creative work, musical work. I would be part of the action. I would be in the studio with the band…and I was getting way ahead of myself here. I chuckled to myself and concentrated on the task at hand.
Rock on, Sophie, rock on
.

Chapter Thirteen

“Spill. Who’s turned your head?” Rachel demanded over coffee two weekends later. The preceding weeks had been manic. Every weekday morning, I went to Dan’s house to help mix and master, and every night, I sat at my computer recording the day’s events on paper.

I took a photo of his mixing console and labeled all the buttons and dials on it. To begin with, most of them were a mystery to me, but Dan worked his way methodically through the console, teaching and coaching me on each fader, each slider, each button, every display. By now, I knew the level at which a voice should record optimally, and I knew what happened if you went too far on the reverb or delay.

A couple of times, we took a track completely beyond the pale. Dan said the best way of avoiding catastrophic mistakes was to try them out, one by one, in a controlled fashion. So we turned a ballad into an oompah song. Yes, trust me, it is possible!

For two whole weeks, I saw no one apart from the kids and Dan. I didn’t have time to catch up with my parents. I didn’t manage to speak to the children’s teachers, terrible mother that I was. And I didn’t once pick up the phone to speak with Rachel. I was stretched to capacity between my recording apprenticeship, motherhood, and housework.

But the previous night, I received a text from Rachel, informing me I
would
meet her for coffee on Saturday morning or our friendship would be terminated. Thus, this morning, I had driven the kids over to her house and dumped them on Alex, who also was left holding the baby. Now Rach and I were once again installed in our erstwhile favorite coffee hole in Tooting. Old habits and memory lane and all that.

“Spill,” Rachel insisted when I failed to respond immediately.

“No one has turned my head,” I objected. “I’ve been busy.”

“Busy, my ass,” Rachel snorted. “You look like the cat who got the cream. Don’t get me wrong…” She stirred two sugars in her cappuccino thoughtfully. “…I totally approve. This was way overdue. Only I don’t like being left out in the cold.”

“I’m not leaving you out in the cold.” Indignation and possibly guilt gave my voice a slightly sharper edge than I had intended. I smiled and softened my expression. “I’m really, honestly, not keeping secrets from you. I’ve been so busy. Dan and I—”

“
Dan,
” Rachel pounced immediately, as I knew she would. “Did you say, ‘Dan and I’?”

I nodded, feeling sheepish.

“
No way
! Don’t tell me you’re rekindling that old flame after all this time!”

“I’m not.
We
’re not.” My voice came out strong and sincere, and Rachel took note.

“You’re not,” she repeated. “And you sound like you mean it. Steve’s memory is still in the way, huh?”

I flinched, and Rachel caught my look of dismay, but ploughed on regardless. “So all right, what is this ‘Dan and I’ business?”

“He’s teaching me to mix music,” I burst out, unable to hold my exciting news in. “He’s training me to be a sound engineer.”

Now, Rachel was my best friend. Had been so since college. We had gone through an awful lot of stuff together, the best, the worst, and everything in between. We sat at each other’s hospital beds and danced at each other’s weddings. She was there when Dan crash-landed back in my life when I was twenty-eight, and she cheered me all the way along. She understood the attraction and the sex and the glamour. But she had
never
‘got’ the music. Not surprisingly, she looked at me blankly.

“A sound engineer.”

I pursed my lips into a goofy smile and nodded. “Yes, a sound engineer.”

“Like the chap who sits behind that desk with all the buttons and does weird geeky things.”

“Exactly like so.”

“And that is exciting because…?”

“Oh Rach, how can I make you understand? It’s amazing. It’s like doing magic. You’ve got the great musicians there, and their talent is unbelievable. Yet they put their trust, their faith, their music into your hands to make a fantastic performance outstanding, to add the edge, the sparkle, the fizz.”

“I
don’t
understand,” Rachel confessed. “I always thought sound recording was a bit of a fraud, you know. If the musician is so great, why do they need all that engineering malarkey?”

I took a deep breath, summoning my every wit to try to explain what sound engineering was all about. “A live voice, a live instrument, that’s a beautiful thing. It’s a living thing with three dimensions. When you try to capture it with a microphone and put it onto a record, you mess with the sound waves, you break them up and parcel them up and reassemble them. It doesn’t matter how good the band is, something gets lost and distorted in the process. A voice like Dan’s, no matter how powerful, can come out dull and hollow, and it doesn’t sound at all like him. The sound engineer undoes that. The sound engineer makes it sound like what it really sounds like.”

Inelegant as though this explanation was, Rachel seemed to connect with it. “So it’s not fixing the tuning or correcting mistakes. It’s more making it true to the original.”

“It
can
be about fixing the tuning or correcting mistakes. A sound engineer can do that, but a professional musician will always insist on re-recording a flawed section to improve on it, and that gets spliced and crossfaded into the recording…”

Rachel poked me in the side. “Listen to you. You sound like a pro!”

“Hardly.” Although I did enjoy the compliment. “Mostly what a sound engineer does is… I don’t know, think about it as a picture gone pale in photocopying and the sound engineer puts the color back in.”

“Nice analogy,” Rachel approved. “Did Dan teach you this?”

“Nuh-uh, I made that up myself.” And it was true, I
had
made it up. Somehow I ‘saw’ music in color; I was forever making the connection, and Dan was endlessly fascinated by it even though I couldn’t explain it properly.

“So that
is
pretty exciting,” Rachel concurred after a little thought. “Is it difficult?”

“Heck yes, it certainly is,” I burst out. “You have to be light-fingered and golden-eared. You can’t just twizzle buttons and off you go. First of all, you have to understand what needs fine-tuning and how. Then there’s all your tools, your EQ and your reverb and your delay and pitch and…”

“I get it, I get it,” Rachel laughed. “It sounds complicated. But I can see that you’ve totally got the fever.”

“I do.” There was no denying it. “It gives me such a buzz. You know, I don’t really ‘do’ music, but mastering and mixing, that’s totally my niche. Dan says…” I petered out, suddenly fearful of sounding arrogant.

“Dan says?”

I took a deep breath. “Dan says I’ve got a real talent for it, and he thinks I’ve really good ears and a light touch.” There, I said it.

“That’s high praise, from a rock star.”

“Indeed.”

“So what’s it you two are doing every day?”

Rachel was still not entirely satisfied that we were only working together, so I explained our routine and Dan’s grand teaching plan. “It’s like an apprenticeship, and when he can’t take it any further, he’ll talk to Richard… you know, Tuscq’s sound man, to see if he can take me on.”