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GW: It's very performance driven.
SCHOLZ: It is. After I've done something like that on tape, then I'll have to go back and listen to it closely, to discover what it is about the effect of the two that I want to bring across when I play it live. I don't do all the solos exactly like the recording. I used to do that, but now I'd rather not. There are key places, though, where I really love what's happening on the record. So I have to figure out exactly what was going on and duplicate that technique on stage.
GW: When it's time to record a solo, what's your usual plan of operation?
SCHOLZ: First I just play along with the basic tracks blasting in my phones. I don't think about what I should play or how long the part should be; I just turn it on and start playing. And I always leave myself plenty of open tracks. The first time I get something that has some magic to it-a feeling that I think does something for the song-that's it, it's done. My tapes have tracks all over the place. Channel 13 might have the lead in the end of the first verse, channel 18 might have the lead in the break.... Sometimes I have to spend hours and days trying to reorganize it so I can mix the total thing afterwards.
GW: Do you do any comping of solos? Taking a few bars from one take and a few bars from another?
SCHOLZ: Yeah, once in a while. Not very often. But I often end up changing the music underneath the solo. I'll sub-tract bars, add bars or change the chords or the bass line. That's true with the lead vocals too. If I hear something that sounds good but won't work with what comes next on the underlying instruments, I'll go back and change the arrangement on the rest of the song. Which is as time-consuming as it sounds. It involves rerecording as many as eight tracks of instruments.
GW: You're not doing MIDI sequencing.
SCHOLZ: No, it's all taped, so any editing I want to do is with a razor blade and splicing tape. If I want to increase the length of the arrangement, first of all I have to cut the master, which doesn't bother me at all. I have 100 splices in most masters these days. I run at 30 IPS and I use 3M M79's, [analog 24-track-recorder] the only machines where you cannot hear splicing. In fact it's very hard to find the splices on a scope.
I can splice with reckless abandon-and I do. I'll also do anything to the underlying chord progression that needs to be done, once I start into a solo or a vocal part. Take that long organ solo in the middle of "Walk On." That started out only being about 16 bars. That whole thing about two-and-a-half or three minutes worth of accompaniment-never existed. I just started playing on the organ and decided, "Oh well, I have a lot more to do here. So I had to make the backing track longer. Then I had to introduce some variety into it, to make it different. I just kind of kept going with it.
GW: Are you working with only one 24-track machine?
SCHOLZ: I use two, but in a very unusual way. Years ago, I did the usual thing. I got a synchronizer and locked the two tape machines together. But for a lot of reasons, I didn't like doing it that way. What I do now is put the basic tracks on one 24-track first. Then I'll put a mix of the basics down on two tracks of a second 24-track machine. On a separate track-or-tracks I'll have a snare drum, hi-hat or some timekeeper from the drum set. I then record all the vocals on the second 24-track machine, using up however many tracks I want. I do the same thing with the singer that I do with my guitar solos.. I have him try a lot of different things. I'll end up with a whole second tape full of vocal parts and maybe some different lead guitar parts. I then dump that stuff back to the original 24 track master. By this point, I will have already sorted through and selected the tracks I want to use, and mixed them all down. So what I dump back onto the master is very concise: lead vocals, harmonies and any additional lead parts I want to use. To do the transfer, I just sync up the two machines by hand. I don't use a synchronizer anymore. I'll put the snare drum from one tape in one ear and the snare drum from the other tape in the other ear.
GW: And you do it manually?
SCHOLZ: Yeah. I do it better than any robot synchronizer. Way better. If you ever make the mistake of putting correlated signals like, say, left and right cymbal overheads on two different tracks of those two different machines, you 11 hear just how horrible a job synchronizers do. The phasing is just all over the place, while the synchronizer is trying to hunt and stay locked on. Some are better than others, but they're all pretty wide of the mark.
GW: You don't use any kind of pilot tone?
SCHOLZ. Nothing. I just run the two machines and use the drums as my guide, keeping them in sync by hand. I make very small speed corrections as the tape runs. I'll use the variable speed control on one tape deck for gross changes. But for small changes, nothing works better than a thumb on the supply reel.
GW: So you're riding it in real time.
SCHOLZ: Yeah, using the drums as my guide. I like to keep the cymbals in the earphones. Those provide the best clue for phase changes. Also, when you have the two machines synched properly, the snare drum will be right in the middle of your head, in your headphones. If the timing goes off, you'll hear the snare move very slightly. The timing we're talking about is very tight, so I can usually get it where I want it. I can also use this technique if I want to make some timing adjustments. Like, if the singer was late on a note or some-thing, I can set it up with an offset, by ear.
GW: Wow!
SCHOLZ: That's part of the art of it. These days people will do similar things on digital systems, where they have a visual display and move events by milliseconds. It's still an artistic thing when you do it that way, but somehow it's a little more fun when it's tape-based. You never do it the same way twice, of course. And with all these analog processes you only get one shot. That's a consequence that doesn't usually exist when you're working with digital storage. You can back up and go back to what you had. But once you erase something on tape, it's gone forever.
GW: Do you feel like that kind of analog tape manipulation is becoming a lost art?
SCHOLZ: Oh, yeah. No one does that anymore. They don't even make the tape that I used for the last two projects anymore.
GW: Scotch 226.
SCHOLZ. Yeah, I had to go buy up a bunch of their remaining stuff The 996 [3M's newer tape stock, which replaced 226] is an amazing tape, but it's just not my cup of tea.
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