Townes

Post date: Jan 27, 2012 6:16:4 AM

Although the star of the film "Crazy Heart" was certainly the songs performed by Jeff Bridges, my favourite musical scene from the movie is actually when the Townes Van Zandt song "If I Needed You" plays in the background.  Townes was probably one of the best songwriters ever.  Steve Earle did an entire cover album of his songs and has claimed in the past that his song writing is superior to that of Bob Dylan.  I originally came across his music several ways.  I think the first time was when I watched "No Direction Home" and he was suitably described as a great song writer.  Josh Ritter also makes reference to him in "Me & Jiggs" where he croons "sitting on the porch singing Townes Van Zandt we play guitar to burn off the hours/ 'til we climb the fences at the edge of town and paint our names on the water towers."  Lastly, we saw Emmylou Harris perform "Pancho and Lefty" at Newport Folk Festival this past summer.

Since I've been making recordings with a lot more instruments/overdubs I've decided to record in stereo.  This allows more 'room' in the mix, achieved by panning tracks right or left.  Collapsed down to mono, this track would sound very cramped.  Unlike my previous methods of recording, this is entirely all overdubs.  No instrument (including the vocals) were performed at the same time!  I started by laying down the Telecaster track (through a Dr. Z Maz 18 Jr. and recorded through a SM57 on axis).  Next I recorded the soft 12-string strumming in stereo with a Zoom H1N pocket recorder.  The last guitar part that was added was the exact same as the Telecaster track but played through a Martin 000 acoustic (again using an SM57).  I partially panned the Telecaster to the left and the Martin 000 to the right giving a nice stereo effect.  The rhythm part was recorded in two phases: 1) hand claps 2) tambourine, both through an SM57.  The vocals were recorded last through a Rode NT1 microphone.

The challenge with recording with so many overdubs is that it doesn't really sound natural like a live recording does.  The tendency is to make everything perfect, but when you evaluate the final project it usually sounds artificial.  I've learned since my earliest overdub projects and I'm now careful not to over process the sound.  Each track has EQ and there is some compression on the vocals.  The vocal track was also adjusted for volume (individual words that were too quiet).  The challenge with this song is that the instrumental parts do not have an overdubbed solo, so the hardest part was actually setting the levels of each track to blend uniformly across the whole song.

If I Needed You (MP3)