The drive from Ypsilanti, Michigan to Austin is a mad trek through several major Midwestern and Southern cities. This year we are bypassing a night in Nashville and pushing past Memphis through to Little Rock, Arkansas. 13 hours in the van on day #1. In Little Rock we stay with old friends Geoff, Jill, and Ned. Geoff, while daylighting as a sociologist, is really one of us: a musician, a multi-instrumentalist, a drummer for the excellent Little Rock based country rock band MULEHEAD. In fact he played drums on my first two CD's; and Jill and their son Ned, along with his grandfather Edward, are the three main characters in my song Eddie Rode the Orphan Train. They're important people to me . . .

As it turns out Geoff is building a sweet project studio in the converted attic of his wonderful southern home. I am grateful for the opportunity to unload my mobile recording studio safely into his house (it took all of one trip to the van!) and run through a little show-and-tell. While it is always fun to compare equipment and talk shop, the conversation with Geoff proves to be a much more precious exercise: a chance for my subconscious to articulate and further flesh out the recording plan for Tuesday in Austin.

Truth be told, I am a "seat of the pants" kind of guy. While meticulous planning and mic/room plots are the tools of most mobile engineer/producers -- I apparently find some joy in the process of electronic improvisation. And I find comfort in self-imposed limitations. After all didn't some of the best reverb sounds come out of Memphis from rigged up bathrooms in small studios? Anyway, as I talk to Geoff I begin to take inventory. I have 8 input channels for this project (via the Metric Halo MIO 2882 pre amps): 4 channels of balanced XLR, a fifth channel through my HHB Radius 50 tube MicPre/Compressor into one of the 1/4" inputs, and then the remaining 3 balanced 1/4" line inputs. I note too that I have 1 XLR to 1/4" transformer. So 6 mics and 2 line level inputs . . .

I also packed an old Emagic EMI 2|6 USB stereo interface in case I want to up my input total to 10. But since this is essentially going to be a garage/punk record, and since there will be tons of bleed on the various tracks (a la the residential recording space), I am probably going to stay with the 8 tracks. The quirks and artifacts of this setup will hopefully add charm and define the personality of this particular project.

I explain to my Arkansas friend Geoff that upon arriving in Austin I would like to start by stopping over at the house where we will be recording and setting up two room mics and do some tests. Ideally I would run the audio from these mics through the MHLabs SpectraFoo software (oscilloscope and audio spectrum analyzer to name 2 of the many tools that comprise this amazing tool) on the bedroom and living room in order to identify the frequencies of standing waves and other sonic artifacts in our potential tracking rooms. My hope in taking the time to do this step would be to identify which of the two rooms would be ideal for drums and which might suit amplifiers and vocals. It would also give me a chance to consciously evaluate and address the acoustics of that space. Perhaps hanging blankets or another lo-budget sound absorption/diffusion solution might be appropriate. Especially as low freq will be limited to kick drum since I'll likely run bass as a D.I. into one of the two non-XLR channels and pull the plug on the Bass Speaker Cabinet. It's nice to have tools like SpectraFoo that will give me graphic help with the acoustics of the space - as mathematical formulas are kind of unwieldy under the pressure of an actual session. Especially on the road.

Perhaps fortunately for the other folks at Geoff's house who were not engineering a record that week(!), a proposed trip to the local Mexican restaurant cuts short our technical/recording studio conversation and my mental planning session. But needless to say the wheels were turning and the project was becoming more tangible.

As a songwriter I've often noted an almost alchemical transformation that occurs when one takes a new song out of the bedroom or basement and plays it in public for the first time. In much the same way, my conversation in Little Rock seems to have catapulted the Neal Pollack Invasion record out of the "planning" realm and into some sort of technological purgatory.

We awake the next morning from a night of enchilada-breath and good sleep. It is now Monday. Yipes. We say goodbye to our friends, and are back in the van for the final leg of the journey to Austin. As we roll through Texarkana and Dallas the sunlight and hints of spring become more pronounced and lovely, and the Michigan winter is fading a bit. A secret anxiety stirs and prohibits me from fully enjoying the scenery: the reality that I have agreed to drive 1300 miles to engineer a live punk record in someone's bedroom, in a total of 6 hours, with a band that has never practiced, while I play guitar, and, yup, the lead singer is a novelist. Oh yeah and the product that I come up with will be promoted worldwide by Harper Collins/Time Warner . . .

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