David Grisman
Helping Save The Tapes With PeakBy Randy Alberts
Over hundreds of studio sessions and thousands of live gigs later, David "Dawg" Grisman still gets excited about every new project. This week it's a young acoustic band from Virginia called Old School Freight Train recording their new CD with Grisman in his cozy Northern California studio.
"Great instrumentalists and a fantastic singer who writes catchy songs," says Grisman, himself the torchbearer of the modern mandolin and Jerry Garcia's dawg-grass soul mate. "They came out to record for a week and now I'm putting it all together with a lot of help from Peak. For the past two years I've worked out all my edits and programs with Peak before cutting any tape."
Using Peak To Save The Tapes
Grisman, a self-described "analog guy in a digital world" now embracing his portable laptop audio workbench, has been extra careful handling analog tape since the last company making it sadly went bankrupt. David just bought, in fact, the last remaining virgin reels of tape in the San Francisco Bay area, tapes that could soon dictate large sums on eBay — but he'll never sell. Since every grease pen's splice mark, edit, and playback on those analog tapes now means so much more than ever before, Dawg is leaning even more heavily on Peak for trying out his every musical edit before cutting a single precious inch of analog tape.
"They call me the 'Raja of the Razor Blade,'" the experienced editor, producer, and engineer laughs confidently. Grisman's production credits include over 60 releases for his own Acoustic Disc label, five Grammy nominations, five movie scores and the popular "Dawgy Mountain Breakdown" theme used for NPR's Car Talk. He has played and recorded with the best-of-the-best including Stephane Grappelli, Bonnie Raitt, Bela Fleck, James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, Earl Scruggs, Ralph Stanley and the Grateful Dead.
"After doing it for 40 years with a blade I still maintain that I could beat any digital system in an editing race. All things being equal, I could mark 'em, cut 'em, and splice 'em on tape faster than even someone in the BIAS office could using Peak!"
Really, he could, he's that good. But to save wear 'n' tear on priceless analog masters rolling through his amazing sounding vintage Ampex ATR-100 or 3M M-23 tape heads, Grisman always bumps the best takes over to Peak before cutting tape. There he experiments with his edits, arrangements, and sequencing ideas and works out everything in Peak — yep, on a computer — and burns his critical listening CDs to further audition those decisions. All before going back to tape or lifting a single GEM single edged razor blade up to his trusty splicing block, the dawg altar of good edits.
"Peak is an invaluable part of my production process and a much more convenient way for me to test out my ideas. It allows me to check out a lot of different edits and experiment with things because, once you start cutting up tape, well," Grisman pauses, clearing his throat, "that's a lot of wear and tear on the tape to put it all back together again if you change your mind later."
Dawg Disk Music: Air Peak
Experimenting as much with his song arrangements in Peak at 30,000 feet as he does at sea level has been a new experience for Grisman the past two years. Be it waiting at busy airports or on a sleepless red-eye flight, with Peak David is in digital editing heaven no matter where he is. You know the ones, passengers smiling out the window after a long flight because they just nailed a complex edit in a great song while everyone else on the plane suffered through two in-flight movies and seven stale peanuts.
"With Peak I can try stuff out on an airplane," says David. "No tape machine can do that. Its a lot more convenient this way, and much better without the potential hacking up of what little tape is left around."
Grisman and his longtime engineers Dave Dennison and Larry Cumings most appreciate the musical reality and sound quality of one-take, direct-to-tape analog recording. "'What is a scratch vocal, anyway?' You should know how to sing and play if you're a singer or musician, and if you're a recording engineer, you have to know how to record."
Cutting direct-to-Peak someday in the future for Grisman? Perhaps. One current project for Acoustic Disc involves using Peak in the final audio channel, the upcoming DVD version of the great 3-volume Tone Poems series of vintage acoustic instrument recordings. The release includes remote recorded voiceovers of instrument experts from all over the world, each recorded by David into his laptop with Peak.
Another recent Peak-specific project is a live recording of a live David Grisman Quintet performance at the legendary Sunset Center in Carmel, California, where Erroll Garner's legendary Concert By The Sea album was recorded. The DGQ concert was mixed to 1/2-inch analog machine and then edited and mastered in Peak.
Soaping Up The Masters With Sound Soap Pro
As much as he's an old school tape engineer — "it just sounds better" — Grisman is the first to tell you he embraces an increasingly digital studio. Though his longtime mastering engineer (Paul Stubblebind) is one of the best, David does occasionally turn to his own ears only for audio restoration projects of his own that might make good use of BIAS Sound Soap Pro in the future. Having restored numerous treasured bluegrass artist and instrument recordings before from old 78s, noisy tapes, and aging VHS soundtracks spanning the past 75 years, one can't help but wonder how Grisman could use his new copy of Sound Soap Pro during his production of a new project he's currently considering: the release of audio recordings of a number of aging string virtuoso performances.
"I told the disc's producers about Sound Soap for this project and that maybe we could co-produce it," concludes Grisman. "I haven't even opened up Sound Soap Pro and wouldn't normally be using something like it, but maybe it will do what we need it to do."