Recently Nathan Golub came in and put down pedal steel and cuatro parts on some of the tracks. Nathan is one of those string wizards one sometimes has the luck to meet; give him anything with strings and he’ll make it sound good. He can probably make music out of shoe strings. He played my old beat up cuatro and fell in love with it so he asked if I knew how to get one. A quick call to my mom in Puerto Rico and she was off to see her cuatro maker friend who quickly set Nathan up with a nice new cuatro.
Nathan recorded cuatro parts on three songs, but the bulk of the work he did was on pedal steel. For the pedal steel, we set up a Peavy Nashville 112 amplifier in a sound room, and Nathan sat in the control room, running through the amp and also direct. The session was, like Koko Goldstein might say, smooth. Nathan had already played the songs with us live, so it was just a matter of streamlining the material for the record. And Nathan is not only an attentive player, but also very easy to work with.
The coolest part of the whole session, though, might have been recording with the plate reverb. On the record, there is a crazy transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster. Neither song has a pedal steel part, but we thought that the transition between them could use some. Well, to tell the truth, at this point we’re throwing everything we got into this transition. Later we’ll have to spend some time editing and mixing it. So when we were about to record the pedal steel part for the transition, Jesse Olley (engineer/co-producer extraordinaire) suggested we use the reverb plate. Reverb plate, said I? What reverb plate? And Jesse said I probably hadn’t noticed it, but it was right against the wall in the room with all the guitars. I had been in that room many times, so I went back and looked again. The reason I hadn’t noticed it is because it looks just like a super long, super tall and super narrow box, almost the size of the wall. I thought it was the wall.
I sent Jesse and email to get some details about the plate. Here’s what he wrote: “It’s an Echoplate II with modifications designed and sold by the guy who originally built it in Chicago in 1983, the last year of production. It's a suspended sheet of stainless steel with a speaker driver and two transducer pickups mounted on the plate. The one control is labeled reverb time scale. It goes from from 1 to 8. It came from the late Wavecastle Studio in Hillsboro where (among others) Zen Frisbee and The Family Dollar Pharaohs recorded their albums.”
Jesse continues, “Here’s a picture of the reverb plate with the side of it removed so you can see the plate.
Note the one cable in, two cables out on top and the lever, top left. The speaker magnet is in the center. The original pickups are the small black things stuck on the plate, the new (modified) ones are the brass disks lower on the plate.”
So we hooked up the pedal steel to the reverb plate, and cranked it up to 7. It was like swimming in an ocean of melted steel. I only wish we could take that monster to a solo pedal steel performance, on top of a mountain, with giant amplifiers pushing the waves of steel down the mountain like musical lava.
Here’s a couple of excerpts from Nathan’s session.
First, the last two minutes of Walk, featuring a steel solo.
Walk excerpt
And then some of the craziness going on in the transition between Itch and Feet Beat Faster.
Itch to Feet Beat Faster transition excerpt
Bonus links:
A Little Reverb History
How to build your own plate reverb
