These recordings
are all taken from jam sessions and practices held in my living
room. All were pretty much first takes, so they are occasionally
rough, but I hope they are entertaining and show a lot of
enthusiasm for the music.
Wry Whiskey was
an old timey band that I belonged to a few years ago. Brian
Clancey is the guitar picker on the Wry Whiskey tunes; he
now plays with fiddler Robin Warren, they perform under name
Spirit Fiddle.
Tom Speth, playing bass and singing lead on Knoxville Girl,
played for many years with Willow Creek, a popular Boston
area bluegrass band. The three of us played together for several
years as Wry Whiskey. Later, we were joined by Richie Chaisson
on the resophonic guitar, and eventually Brian Clancey moved
on to play with Spirit Fiddle, and was replaced by the late
Gene Kettlehohn. The group broke up several years ago when
I got too busy to practice. Richie has since joined the Pine
Hill Ramblers, a Boston area bluegrass band.
I often pick
these days with clawhammer picker and banjo historian Ed Britt,
who lives one town over. Ed is the banjo picker for the Boston
area old-time band Blunt Instruments, and is the designer
of the fancy Grand Artist Renaissance model Ome banjo.
Most of the audio
recordings were made on a Tascam Porta 07, or Portastudio
424. These are analog cassette machines, both allow up to
four tracks to be recorded simultaneously. The 424 is the
current model, and compared to digital, is very inexpensive.
The mixing was done on the Tascam with the line out plugged
directly into the line in port on the Soundblaster card in
my PC. I used CoolEdit 2000 to further edit the recordings
as needed. I did try a digital machine once, but the results
of going from digital to analog to digital produced surprisingly
inferior sound quality. Recently, I have switched
to using my Toshiba laptop computer with a Tascam US-122 USB
audio interface, and using the Cubase LE software which came
packaged with the Tascam unit to do the recording and editing.
