Interview with F.M. Cornog of East River Pipe

Reprinted from Guitargeek.com

The inseparable duo of F.M. Cornog (a.k.a. East River Pipe) and Barbara Powers (a.k.a. Hell Gate Recordings) has been quietly recording and releasing some of the most sincere and heartfelt music since the turn of the decade. F.M. does the recording and Barbara does the releasing. As always, the curious staff here at Guitar Geek wanted to know just how they do it. In all the years we've been interviewing home-recordists this interview stands out as one of our favorites. F.M. and Barbara's enthusiasm and do-it-yourself work ethic should rub off on you by the end of this wonderful chat.

Guitar Geek: FM why do you record yourself?

FM: It's just the way I've always done it. I can't explain it. I've always liked tape recorders and I guess I like the control element of it also... Hey can I scratch that answer??

Guitar Geek: Yeah, sure start over...

FM: It's just like as opposed to what? I mean I record myself because this is very relaxed atmoshere here in the apartment and Tascam mini studios are the easiest things to use in the world. I don't have to go into a real recording studio and spend 25-50 bucks an hour. I can do it whenever I want to, I can wake up and go, "Hey I'm gonna do a song now>" I don't have to book time in a studio.

Guitar Geek: So as soon as inspiration hits, it can be on tape within minutes?

FM: Yeah, I like to record my stuff right when it's happening. Like right when I write a song. I don't do demos or anything, I just kind of go, "Oh geez, OK, this is kinda like a song here, so I'm gonna do this right away." And I just do it right at that moment. That's the other advantage of the mini-studio I guess the average band would ahve one guy who would write the song, he would have a rough little demo of it, bring it to his buddies, teach them the song, book some studio time, go into the studio and then watch this clock hanging over their heads. Then they have to think "Oh geez, do I want to keep this guitar part, or this one? That's too complicated for me , y'know, all that stuff. I like the immediacy of just one person. I don't collaborate with anybody, I go in, by myself, and get everything done whenever I want to.

Guitar Geek: Have you had any bad experiences in "pro" studios? Did that fuel your desire to want to record by yourself?

FM: I've actually only recorded one song ever in a "real" recording studio, so no, not really, no bad experiences. That was a long time ago. Basically I've always been into recording. Geez, when I was a kid I would get two little Panasonic tape recorders and bounce stuff off them. I'd play a piano part, record it. Then play the other tape recorder, while recording on the other, as I play another part over that one. I'd have another double track piano part I'd bounce and record again; real messy fidelity-wise, but who cares? I liked liked the fun off messing around with tape recorder and seeing what it sounded liked.

Guitar Geek: Are some of the reasons you record solo due to finances?

FM: Of course. It is so cheap to do it by yourself with just a mini-studio. You just need to come up with the money for the original investment of the mini-studio itself, seven hundred bucks or whatever.

Guitar Geek: What type of mini-studio do you have right now?

FM: I have a Tascam 388, it has eight tracks, but only six of them actually work. The two channels on the end are messed up, so it's really just a six track!

Guitar Geek: Is it one of those old 1/4 inch decks?

FM: Yeah, outside of that, all I have is really cheap stuff. The whole East River Pipe studio thing is that I don't have any expensive rack-mounted stuff. I only have cheap guitar pedals, I never used big named brands like Boss or something like that. Everybody uses those! I use cheap effects stuff, just so I'm not using the same pedals as everyone else Some pedals I play guitar through, or sometimes I even sing through them. What else do I have? Mmm, a cheap ESP Telecaster, an old Gibson bass, a little Peavey 50 amp, a cheap microphone, a few drums, a drum machine, a lot of percussive instruments, a few cheap keyboard-synthesizer type things, and that's about it. It's a simple set-up. I like that best. I like to concentrate on the song and the performance rather than the gear. If I had some expensive rack-mounted reverb unit, I'd be fiddling around with that trying to decide what kind of reverb I wanted, room size, or whatever complicated setting I should put it on. I like to plug the f***ing guitar in and play the song y'know? That's what all these East River River songs are, just very spontaneous things.

Guitar Geek: Is your technical knowledge of the recording process great, or do you just strictly go by what sounds good?

FM:I follow Ray Charles technique. His advice to people recording is: "As long as it's not distorting, it's fine." Obviously, he can't see the needle going into the red, so, if it's not fuzzy, leave it. Next to an engineer that works in a 24 track studio, I'm sure I don't know anything, but it doesn't matter how you record a song. Whether it's at home or in a super-deluxe studio is not important. What is important is that you have a good song and a good performance. That's what matters.

Guitar Geek: A lot of people get hung up on the techincal side of things, I guess.

FM: People tell me, "Oh, oooh, you're LO-FI, you're sooo D.I.Y." I'm not into LO-FI, I just don't want to spend fifty dollars an hour to go into some studio. I can do it right here, no pressure, no clock hanging over me, and do it whenever I want. I'm getting redundant now, but I'm not going for some lo-fi asthetic, it's just the way I've always done it. This is the natural way for me to do it. Other bands go into big studios and that's natural for them. I've been doing it this way for fifteen years.

Guitar Geek: I think a lot of people have purposely taken that route just to fit in with some lo-fi movement, but some people, myself included, have gone into studios and come out with nothing but horror stories. Y'know wasting tons of money, having some goofball for an engineer, or whatever. Experiences like that have driven lots of people into getting their own small recording set-ups and just doing it themselves.

FM: True. One time I had this old song of mine that I'd already recorded, but we didn't have anything to mix down to, like to two-track stereo. So we took it into this actual recording studio. This Tascam I have is incompatible with with anything, so you just have to take the whole board in. You can't just take the tape, because no studio has an 8 track 1/4 inch that fits with this deck. It's not like it's this big cumbersome thing, but we didn't have a car or anything. So we loaded it in this taxi and went to the studio. We get there and this studio guy decides he's going to mix my songs. The way he mixed my song and the way I would've mixed my songs are two different things. Recording wise too, there is a big difference in the way I would record and the way a studio guy would. A lot of my methods production-wise are much like Phil Spector or Brian Wilson. I double track a lot of guitars, whereas a lot of people would say, "buy this fancy guitar thing, like chorus pedal and that's kinda like double tracking in a way, plus it'll free up an extra track." But it's a totally different thing if you don't use that gizmo, an you actually sing or play it twice. It's a completely different feel.

Guitar Geek: Plus you'll get some inconsistencies, that sound more natural.

FM: Right, it just... sounds... better!

Guitar Geek: Run us through a typical recording session. Where do you start?

FM: I'll use a drum machine as either an actual drum thing or a click track device and play guitar and sing. That's it. So I lay down a drum thing, a guitar thing, and a vocal thing, first run through. Then I just add and subtract tracks from there. Sometimes I add percussion tracks on top of that and then maybe drop out the drums. It can happen a million ways.

Barbara: What is consistent though, is he usually maps out ahead of time how the song should be structured and arranged; what kind of guide track to lay down.

Guitar Geek: With 8 tracks, it can be brain racking deciding where to play everything, when to bounce tracks, or laying down select guitar part on the same track where the vocals are, but when they aren't singing, junk like that.

FM: I can usually see this road map in my head; when to do this part first, that part second, verse here, back into this, and I know it'll end up at 2-3 minutes. It's hard to explain it 'cause I can't intellectualize it. It's intuitive. I just do it and I still haven't gotten used to people asking me how I record. People think there's some kind kind of secret recipe and I just don't know. The great thing about recording at home is you can listen back to your songs over and over again and see how it sounds. You can drop out a guitar part and make it a keyboard song, anything. Unless your the Beatles or Fleetwood Mac, with a billion dollars to throw away, you can't give that kind of attention to the songs, unless it's at home. You have the free time to sit back and listen to it at length. Think how long it takes just to mix one song...

Guitar Geek It takes hours!

FM: Minimum! You can take longer mixing it than actually recording it . To think of doing that at a "real" studio is mind boggling. I mean the fidelity in places like that is cool and everything, but if I were to ever go into one again it would have to be with someone I really trusted and who wouldn't charge me tons. That's a utopian scenario, but it would have to that kind of thing or hey, I'll just do it here at home. Maybe I could even upgrade my studio...

Guitar Geek With some Boss pedals!!!

FM: (laughs) Yeah, just splurge! My big thing would be to buy a guitar pedal that costs over a hundred dollars! But for now all my guitar pedals must be made of plastic!

Guitar Geek: I know it's hard to explain how the recording process works, and that's not really the main point I wanted to make. I would like to stress that all this can be done. A lot of very amazing bands and musicians are intimidated by the whole process of recording and releasing songs. To some people it seems unapproachable, almost like this huge wall, whereas people like Barbara and yourself have done it. The whole fallacy of getting signed to a big label, recording with a huge budget, blah, blah, blah. Yes, that is one way to do it, but you two have proven there is another route, another pathway to take. It's like you have sidestepped everything ridiculous and got right to the core of what needs to be done.

FM: Wow! That will look good in print. I wish I'd have said that!

Guitar Geek I could always switch the names! Barabara Oh yeah, and mmm, then FM said...

FM: The main thing is (in a mock British accent) you've just got to do it! You buy the machine, then poke around with it. Geez, go to any art gallery and you'll say, "That painting sucks, man! Why is that hanging on this wall?! I could do better than that!" That's the thing, you could! Buy some paint and canvas, go home and paint a picture. Then you'll have it hanging in Soho someday! It doesn't cost that much to record yourself, at least not compared to paying for time in a big studio. Buy a mic, plug your guitar into track and just see where it leads you. That's it! That's the secret. You can't be afraid. You can't say, "Oh, this doesn't sound as good as a Sebadoh thing, or a Ween cut, Guided By Voices," or whatever. Take the leap. The only difference between me and a lot of people out there is I have the will, bought the equipment and then actually recorded the songs

Beatles Re-Mania

I just watched the trailer to The Beatles Rock Band again.
And yes, i do think its awesome. It looks literally like they just animated photographs and movie reels of exact moments in the beatles career. And oh yeah, it comes out today!! I just read how Bill Wyman, former bass player of a little band called The Rolling Stones, thinks rock band is a bad thing. He thinks it encourages kids to not play real instruments. I must disagree with Bill. As a guitar teacher, i have actually gained many new young students specifically from Rock Band and Guitar Hero. What it really does is not really about the video game at all. It takes music, in this case the beatles catalog, and exposes it to a new generation. Where else are these 9 and 10 yr olds gonna hear this amazing music? And the kids who are motivated to learn an instrument, were going to go ahead and do it anyway. I can't imagine a driven kid who would get the game, who might be musically inclined , getting good at the game and then having it end there.
This is the future, get with it, or get left behind.

Rock Class

I want to thank my students in the Classic Rock Rock Classes this summer for making our initial outing so fun and successful. The classes were adult bands. The classes met weekly for 8 weeks, and the culmination was a benefit show for MAESSR at The M Room in fishtown in philly. Some of the songs that were played were: "Wishing Well" by Free, "No Matter What" by Badfinger, "The Weight" by The Band, and "Rebel, Rebel", by Bowie. The fall classes that we are doing are The Beatles, and a Singer-Songwriter themed class. Any bassists or drummers out there, there are 2 spots in the Beatles class, one for bass and drums. Get in touch.

Which Guitar, Why?

This post is about which guitars we prefer for whatever type of music we happen to be playing at the moment. First off, let's start off with Gibson vs. Fender. A lot of guitarists I meet seem to be one or the other, where as I feel there is a time and a place for both. If you're gonna be playing blues, hands down fender is your guitar. Nothing quite cuts through the din like the piercing attack of a strat with the selector in bridge position. Think SRV. Think Buddy Guy. Think Hendrix. Actually, there are so many different guitarists associated with both gibson and fender, playing a wide variety of styles, it can be hard to keep track of. Let's talk about who plays Gibson's and why. For my money, if you're going to be playing any kind of "heavy" music, Gibson will do you right. Much of Randy Rhoads' best work was done with his cream colored gibson les paul custom. Hendrix was actually known to play gibson(Flying V) in his later years. See the Isle of Wight concert from 1970. Another Ozzy guitarist associated with the Les Paul is Zakk Wylde. His tone is a little over the top and that has a lot to do with the pickups he uses. He uses Emg's. Emg's with a les paul can almost bee Too distorted and heavy for my tastes anyway. If your gonna tackle country, its pretty much the Telecasters place. Although Keith Richards used it famously throughout the Rolling Stones for country inflected rock. You also might want to consider The Chet Atkins Gretsch or The Country Gentleman for country. I will briefly mention a few other models and comment on how i feel about them. ESP Guitars: Cool, and really good for metal, good shredding guitar. Gretsch White Falcon: Awesome, extremely versatile and a guitar i hope someday to own. Gibson ES-335: Probably the most versatile guitar out there, you can play almost any style on it, and it rocks!(Full disclosure: I own a cherry red 1967 ES-335). PRS guitars:my least favorite brand. I can't stand the twig like necks and i think the "tone" people speak of when they mention them is very overrated. Plus they are sorta ugly. Haha. Anyway tell us what you think! what guitars do you play, and what styles do you use them for?
-Danielelectric

Geriatric Indies Review Wilco and Dirty Projectors Live from Philly!

Pics From Rock Show # 1

Some pix from the show

Rock Show # 1 A Total Success!

Thanks to everyone who came out and supported The Rawk U School Of Music On June 10th at Milkboy in ardmore, pa. The show was great fun, and everyone really did play their absolute best. We are already looking towards the future, and the next show. Rock Show # 2 will most likely go down sometime early in 2010. Next on the agenda: Summer Rock Classes! I am running 2 separate classic rock themed classes this summer. These classes are for adults only this time around. Our guitarist spots are all filled, but if there are any bass players, or drummers who want to play some awesome music for 8 weeks and then get to play a show afterwards, get in touch. Call Daniel directly @ 267 240 3779. Classes meet tuesday, wednesday starting tuesday june 30.
thanks and keep us in mind,
-Danielelectric