This article originally appeared in Acoustic Guitar magazine. © String Letter Publishing, all rights reserved.
Jack West and Curvature, As We Know It
This month's winning Homegrown CD features excellent production values and a virtuosic approach to original acoustic jazz. Jack West and Curvature (Jack West on eight-string guitar, Dean Magraw on six-string, Joel Davel on marimba, and Peter Valsamis on drums) create a groove and a forum for improvisation rarely found in acoustic music. West released the CD on his own label, Ahead Behind, and achieved excellent results using basic equipment, creative problem solving, and the help of a few friends. He plays bass lines and regular guitar parts simultaneously, making good use of the extended range of his eight-string flattop, which was custom-built by Jeff Traugott. His technique brings to mind the work of fellow (electric) eight-stringer Charlie Hunter. In fact, late saxophonist Calder Spanier, a past member of Hunter's band, also played with Curvature for some time.
West used to play a standard guitar, but, as he explains, "When I played six-string, I ended up with something like 20 different tunings and I started thinking that if I just had another string I wouldn't have to retune so much. Being able to play Charlie's [eight-string] guitar convinced me that it was playable, and I also heard some of Lenny Breau's stuff, where he's using the high A on his seven-string." Although West still relies on a variety of tunings, his most common is now standard with added high and low A strings.
As We Know It is the third Curvature album produced in West's home studio, located in his two-bedroom flat in Oakland, California. The studio is based around a pair of original "blackface" Alesis ADATs and a Yamaha Pro Mix 01 mixer, which gives West 16 tracks of digital recording. West wanted to capture the band playing live, rather than recording basic tracks and having the individual musicians overdub their parts, so he had to figure out how to separate the sources. Partially inspired by renowned Bay Area multi-instrumentalist Mike Marshall's article on home recording in Acoustic Guitar ("Bringing It All Back Home," March 1996), West and the session's engineer Paul Scriver decided to place each of the quartet's musicians in a separate room connected to the others by microphones and headphones. Dean Magraw was flown in for the session, which had to be completed in three days, and the lack of preparation combined with an inability to rely on visual cues made it difficult to record the album live. "I had sent Dean some rough tapes and some charts I had written out in Finale," recalls West, who also arranged a local gig the night before the first session to warm the band up.
With the drums set up in the living room ("You need a large room to make them sound good," says West), the marimba in the control room, and Magraw in the bedroom, West retreated into a tiny corner next to his laundry room. In order to achieve maximum isolation, West used large pieces of cardboard in the doorways between the rooms, creating double panes that successfully kept bleed between tracks to a minimum.
West's eight-string was miked with a Neumann KM 84 at the fingerboard and an AKG 414 placed close to the body. Because it's difficult to accurately reproduce the instrument's extended low range with mics alone, West also used the signal from a Fishman Rare Earth Humbucker pickup, run through a Tech 21 SansAmp Acoustic preamp and recorded to a separate track. "It's EQ'd with pretty much all the mids and highs rolled off, so it's really just bass," says West, who adds that this technique helped establish the guitar's presence in the overall sound. Magraw's Martin D-16 was miked with another KM 84, as well as with a custom-made, omnidirectional, large-diaphragm condenser microphone made by Scott Morrison ([805] 462-8380, dagmarscott@hotmail.com]. Two AKG C460 overhead mics and one AKG E35EV captured the sound of the marimba, and a variety of strategically placed overheads as well as several closer mics told six or seven ADAT tracks what the drums sounded like.
As We Know It was mixed the old-fashioned way, by manually controlling the board while recording the results to a Tascam DA30 mk II DAT machine and monitoring through ADS M1 hi-fi speakers. A BBE 862 Sonic Maximizer was used on the kick drum, and a few of the Yamaha board's built-in reverbs were used as effects. West estimates that he probably worked on mixing the album for about a month, making frequent use of the Pro 01's ability to store "scenes" (settings). Although he achieved excellent results, West says that he'd most likely hire a professional engineer for the job in the future. "As you get better at hearing the music, you realize that there's all this stuff that you have to do during the mix," he explains. "If you don't do it every day, like a good engineer does, you don't have the chops. You're hearing what needs to be done, but it takes you an hour to do it, instead of five minutes."
For mastering, the DAT mix was transferred to a Macintosh G3 using a Mark of the Unicorn 2408 interface and software. In keeping with the philosophy of a live recording, very little editing was done in this process, but compression added to some of the peaks gave the finished product a polished sound. The album's artwork was a collaborative effort by West, his girlfriend Christina Manansala, and a couple of photographer friends, Ken Gosset and Steve Fish. West printed an initial run of 500 copies of As We Know It, which he intends to sell at gigs and on his Web site, www.aheadbehind.com.
As We Know It caught the attention of producer Lee Townsend, whose credits include work with guitarists Bill Frisell, John Scofield, and Dusan Bogdanovic. "I had his phone number from a friend, and I called him up to see if he might be able to recommend a producer for me," West explains. "I didn't think he'd be interested himself. He called me back and said, 'I've been listening to your records, and I think you're ready to take this to the next level.'" The results of Townsend's production skills will soon be heard on Curvature's next release, Big Ideas, which was recently recorded at San Francisco's Mobius studio. It features Scott Amendola (Charlie Hunter, Tony Furtado) on drums, Mark Summer (Turtle Island String Quartet) on cello, and Joel Davel on marimbas. West plans to release the album on his own label in January before shopping it around to some of the majors.
West is already thinking about his next project, which he plans to record in his modest home studio. He is planning on spending his $1,000 prize certificate from Sweetwater Sound on either a microphone or a recording card for his Macintosh.
--Teja Gerken