Making an album (The Home Ruler)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the Home Ruler from a session at the ArtHouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about making an album. I have been thinking about this a lot. This isn't really about making a big studio album where people are helping you, but this is how I made an album as an independent musician. The first thing you need for an album is a bunch of music that you play well, that is, you know, in some way unique to you, and hopefully you have a lot of music that you enjoy playing, that you want to share more than enough from an album. 

You get to pick out what you want to record on the album and start to arrange it. I would say arranging is the hardest part. It's hard to say because I hadn't made an album in a while and I kind of found it all to be the hardest part. Arranging was surprisingly challenging for me. Maybe it's easier if you don't do it with your husband. It was challenging, you know. 

We had to decide exactly how many times we were going to play a tune and how we were going to start it, the introduction, and how we're going to end it or put a tag on it, how to change it. Basically, each time we played it, what we were going to add or take away, and with our album we did sets of tunes. So we also had to decide how we were going to transition into the next tune. 

But even with songs, you know, you have to decide with each verse and chorus how you're going to change the accompaniment or do things differently, and everything needs to be planned out pretty carefully beforehand. Yeah, arranging is a lot of work. We had someone to help us with us. This was the biggest job that our producer did was to help us arrange the music. 

Once you have the music all arranged the way you weren't going to play it on the album and we had all the arrangements written down, then we had to practice them. Ideally, you're practicing it under some kind of pressure, because when you're in the studio faced with the microphone, you feel a little nervous. I was surprised about that. We did a couple performances where we performed basically almost the whole album just to practice the arrangements and see what went well and what still needed work. I practiced a lot with the metronome because we used a click track when we recorded. 

When we got into the studio we were at a really nice homey kind of studio in an old church in Ithaca called Electric Wilberland and by the time we did some small talk and caught up with the sound engineer and had coffee and bagels and there was a bit of fussing with different microphones trying to get the good basic sound. And then it was like okay, you ready to do your first take and I would say it was a little nerve-wracking even for someone who you know I record for this podcast. 

We don't we just record here in our home after we practice for a day or two, so it's nothing fancy. But I also have performed a lot throughout my life but I was surprised at how nervous I was. You know that you can record it again if you make a mistake, but it does kind of rattle you and you know they ask you to keep playing through the whole thing to try to get big chunks of music that sound good that then can be stitched together later to make a whole clean track. But after you do a big screw-up can be tricky to get your mind back on track and do an awesome performance. I don't know. 

I think I got better at it. We tended to play the best the third time. We would do three takes and the third take was often the best, and so most of the time we used the third take and then, if there was a mistake, something went wrong, we would patch in from one of the other takes. Hopefully there was that spot went better One of the other times. 

A few times we tried to do a fourth or a fifth take and by that time we were so tired and cross-eyed that it didn't usually get better, started sounding worse. So there's all this patching that you do where you are listening in the studio and then you say like, uh-oh, what was that note? It was really flat there, I didn't hit that right. And then they go and look and the other takes to see if you made it sound better. And it's just a miracle how they can patch it all together when you're hearing these people's albums and everything sounds absolutely perfect. Uh-uh-uh, a lot of that has been constructed. It's impressive. 

At some point we stopped trying to make it perfect. I don't mind a little bit of a rougher sound To me a little too perfect, can make it sound a little less like a trad sort of folk music to me. I don't like it a little rougher around the edges. But yeah, takes, takes, takes and then putting them all together and if your arrangement is really solid then hopefully you did something similar so you can figure it out when you're sitting there on the couch and listening and listening, and listening. Yeah, it's a little tricky. Did that sound good? Wait, can you play the other take? Did that sound better? And you know you hear listening. 

We had to kind of figure out what kind of reverb we wanted to put on the sound, what we wanted the sound to be. I kind of hate all reverbs, so I imagine I was a little bit difficult to work with, but there's a lot of work there. Then we came home so we basically got all that done in Ithaca. We're home now and there's still some finishing up with the mastering and finishing everything and then we'll start uploading the tracks to Bandcamp and putting it out into the world. 

You know I've self-published several books and it did remind me of writing a book in that it felt like a process you could get better at. I see why my friends who have recorded on five albums or for years and years and have eight or 10 albums where they get better and better, because you can work really hard and it can still not come out exactly how you want it. But I hope I'll have a chance to make some more albums because I do think I learned a lot from this process this time and just like I felt like it got easier for me to write and publish books the more I did, I imagine it's kind of the same for working on an album. 

Yeah, so the tune for today is the Home Ruler, and this is another hornpipe, the one that pairs with Kitty's Wedding, which we did last week. It's a tune by Frank McCallum. So Frank McCallum was was a fiddle player and accordion player who, I believe, who lived in Ireland, also had a passion for gardening and bees and old clocks. He was a member of a local pipes band. 

When he got older he mostly focused on the fiddle and the accordion and the discussion about this tune is you know, people wondered if it was connected to the politics of Ireland. The Home Ruler, the story goes, is that he named it after his wife the home ruler after his wife, and it was just a little bit of a joke that it also kind of referred to this political situation in Ireland. 

Matt Malloy has a slow tempo version of this played on the B-flat flute on the Chieftain's album Boil the Breakfast Early, played as kind of a slow march, which sounds really nice, over a sort of cello drone accompaniment. Also versions recorded by Noel Hill and Tony Linnane and Sean Ryan, so you can check out this tune. We're going to play it for you right now. The Home Ruler. We'll play it as a faster hornpipe. This is how we did it at the session. Great.