Episode Transcript
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Hi. Welcome back to the Nathans and Ron Castle. This is one of our mini episodes, and my name is Michael Ronstadt. We're doing something a little bit different today because we're sitting here with my good friend, Dave Crittle.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: Hey, Dave, how are you doing?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: I'm doing good.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: So Dave and I work together, and we basically nerd out on music, anything music or a little bit of tech, because you know, it and computers and all that stuff, much better than I. You build guitar pedals for fun. I don't do that. Michael doesn't do guitar pedals, but I will be the idea guy. But we nerd out on jazz guitar and all that stuff.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: We can bore anybody really quickly. If you get a wife or a non musician or a non. Even a musician who is a non technical nerd, we can bore them real quick.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: So that's what we're gonna do today. But before we. Maybe before we go into the danger zone of that, Dave, tell me about the track that we heard in the intro, because the intro was a little bit different and listeners may not know.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a song that I did back in the dark ages of audio home recording 1999.
It's a song called Flabbergasted that I did with my friend Jude Hayden, and we had a band called the Bees back then, and that was on our second album. And it was. Yeah, a real. A real gumbo of all kinds of instruments going on there. And that was a real fun one to record.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Nice. And you did it all at home, right? So you kind of did the home recording thing when it was. I think you were telling me it was more expensive back then.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yes, yes. All these little things. Yeah, they were. Yeah, they were really.
You didn't have all of these ubiquitous sound cards everywhere that you could pick up for a store. I had to really research and buy new cards for my computer. And, you know, and even back then, computers were not fast enough to handle more than. At first it was four tracks at once, and then it was eight tracks I could get to. And about this time, I think I was up to where the computer could handle about twelve tracks at a time.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: And that's a ton. I mean, at least you're into the reel to reel world, kind of.
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Right? Right. Yeah, it was. It was pretty. It was pretty amazing place to be, because that, you know, just all of this online editing you could do and all that thing. This was really early days, so this was quite mind blowing to go from noisy, noisy cassette tapes to this pristine, you know, digital world. So, yeah, it was. It was pretty cool.
[00:03:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I dabbled a little bit with sonar and with cakewalk before it was sonar, and I got really good at using it for the audio. I started with the Midi, and these days I almost feel anti midi because it was so frustrating and beautiful at the same time. But I just want to be done with Midi. It's more for composing at this point.
But you have dealt with keyboards and analog synth controllers. I mentioned guitar pedals. You play guitar amazingly beautifully. Well, we work together, huge inspiration, and we teach each other jazz guitar as best we can without actually having a jazz teacher.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: That was my. Yeah, that was my challenge to Michael. Michael was giving my daughter cello lessons, and I said, michael, how would you like to get really good at jazz guitar? Because I need a tennis partner.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: I think we're getting better every time.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: I think we are. Yeah, it's been pretty, pretty cool.
I delve into Michael's.
Michael's UCM brain, the conservatory of Music brain, and pull out all sorts of interesting things that I don't understand. And it's been a great. It's been great for me. I've been very helpful, happy that you had me along for this ride.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Well, it's completely mutual because one of the things that we've done is you bring ideas, different ideas of thinking about chords, different instructional books. Sometimes you come with a full agenda, and I'm like, well, good. I don't have to figure out an agenda. And sometimes I've got an agenda every so often.
And then we've done a little bit of writing together, but we've also been inspiring each other to write jazz tunes. And on top of that, I've learned through knowing you all these years that you have collaborated with people in the past. You had an early podcast you did with collaborating with a few people in.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: That direction, with Andrew brierly from Australia.
We were in a podcast in 2006, and it's called the Home recording Odyssey. And he was in Australia. That's one thing. Think hard before you do a podcast with somebody who's in Australia, because you're in exactly the opposite time zone. So I would have to get up at 530 in the morning to get his 630 at night.
So. So it was. It was very, very interesting. But, yeah, we did those. We did what you call it, double Ender. He recorded and I recorded, and then we sent it over the ancient Internet back in those days and. And mixed it all together. But, yeah, it was. It was an instructional show, and we got quite a number. You know, we had about a thousand people listening to every episode back in those days, and. And people really got into it. I would just sit down and try to teach how to record an acoustic guitar, how to record a drum set, how to record vocals, and just try to take one topic at a time and impart the knowledge that I had learned from reading all those books and putting in all that time, you know, to try to impart it to people in it. And it was really well received. So that was fun. But after 45 episodes of that, it was. That was a lot of effort to put each of those together so well.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: I wondered if you were on the phone and then recording separately with microphones or did you have a program you used?
[00:06:30] Speaker B: Yeah, we was. We used we called each other with the. Probably a predecessor to zoom. I can't remember. It's like probably AOL chat or something like that. And then, yeah, we would record his end down in Australia, and I would record my end. And our little trick was to clap at the beginning of each episode. And then I could see that in his waveform when he sent it to me. And then I just line them up, and it sounded like we were in the same room. Magic.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: It's amazing. Yeah. And in 2006, it probably was like, how did they do that? I mean, people have been doing that forever, probably. Terry Gross with all her interviews. If they were remote, they had to do some sort of connection and then record in their respective places.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: It's called a double ender on the inside world.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: Indeed. You could tell we're live because we have lawn mowers. It's I mean, it's the recording engineer's nightmare, especially if you're doing it at home and we've got a window. I closed the window, but it's still loud. And I think our neighbors hire a service to just get it done fast. So, hey, we chose the perfect time, but we're gonna keep going with it. And there's another podcast that you did.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Shortly.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Shortly after that, one of the listeners to Hro home recording odyssey had a podcast called the Homemade hit Show. Oh, yeah, somebody did a really awesome. I just remembering somebody did a really awesome intro to that.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: I saw his jazz hands.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: But so we did. He did the homemade hit show. And basically what that concept was was people from all over the world would send him songs, and then he would pick three of them to play every week. And then.
So he was talking about it, and then I joined him at about episode 60. I want to say something like that. And then we did another. I think we did through 250 or something like that. So we did a whole bunch of episodes, but we would just listen to the songs and we'd play them, and then we'd comment about things that we thought they did that were interesting or great in the songwriting or in the production or in the lyrics. And it was really a very supportive group. And then after we would get done with each episode, we would post them, and then we'd get all these comments in the message board, sort of helping them with the song ideas. And a lot of collaborations came out of that. It was a really cool show.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: I love that Aaron Nathans, I know, runs a songwriter group out of Philly. We participate with February album writing month, which we just interviewed Burr settles. It'll be next season, so everyone listening, you haven't heard this yet, but Burr Settles was interviewed, and he founded that. And he also was in the beginning of working with the Duolingo team about ten years ago. Interesting guy. But you know that long distance collaboration is what happened with fom.org because it was one of those things, like, I guess 20% of the songs created were collaborative rights. And, I mean, you get two people in a room, you get something that's greater than some of it, or two.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: People across the Internet.
Yes, I wrote with.
He wasn't a garbage man, he was a trash engineer or something along those lines. From Wisconsin. I wrote a song with him. I wrote a song with a guy from Sweden.
You know, it was really cool. It was a really neat thing. And I had all of these virtual friends all over the world, and Kathy was. This was early days Internet, and my wife was a little bit more skeptical of, who are these people that you're giving all of your deepest, darkest secrets to and getting to know you don't know these people. But it was really funny how that early in the days, there was that worrying that, who are these people on the other end of the Internet? But I still keep up with a lot of these people, and it was a really great experience.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: You make friends for life, essentially. And like any friendship in person, if you have a long time apart, if it's a true friendship, you come back together and it's like time never passed. And that leads me to the other part of your musical creativity, is that you've released a few albums between a collaboration between you and your friend Jude, and I've heard some of his solo stuff more recently.
I've heard a number of the songs that you've recorded together, and the quality is impeccable. And then you told me you had never recorded at a recording studio. You did it all at home. And I was like, what the heck? I mean, you went and worked on some mastering at some places. So that's part of our collaboration. I mix and a lot of stuff I send to you to do the mastering, especially my classical stuff that I've put out. But, I mean, obviously you put in the time, so I want to hear about. I'm telling you what I want to hear.
I'd love to hear about Jude. I'd love to hear about the name of the band that you had the project, and maybe a little bit about the song we're going to share with everyone, because afterwards we're going to get our gut reactions about listening.
[00:11:53] Speaker B: Right, cool. Yeah, this was. So I met a guy named Jude Hayden at Miami University back in 1989, I guess it was. And we got together.
We were the two guys on the floor of our dorm who played guitar. And so we started doing a duo in college and just doing acoustic guitar stuff. And we had a really fun banter with each other, so we did that for years. And then after we played in bands together for a while, he was always writing, always recording. Even in high school, he had, like, 45 songs written or something like that.
They just keep coming out of him. So after college, we got together, and I started getting really interested in recording. And I was on that leading edge of the home recording thing with computers and things. And so I was nerding out on all the details of how do I get a good recording at home? And I was reading all the books. The guy that recorded minute work wrote a really good book about how to record the basics of all these instruments. So I was just diving in and learning that. And then I had other friends locally here in Cincinnati. Roger Klug, Brian. Lovely. That I was bouncing things off of. And I remember Brian saying, wow, you've got a really good handle on bass. That's, like, the hardest thing to do, and you're doing this at home. And I was like, I don't know. I just read enough to learn. I remember also recording magazine had cassette tapes that you could buy that had all these examples of, here's how to use compressor, here's how to use all these things on a cassette tape. And I just listened to that over and over again to learn how things are supposed to sound. And that's where a lot of the learning came from.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: I mean, you don't shy away from experimenting something that you may not put out, but you record it. And then you experiment or you say, hey, can I mess with that thing? You had asked me for something and you just want to play around with it just to learn. And that's what I love about it, because you do it for the joy of it. It's not necessarily just to say, I've got to get this song out there. So when you and Jude started working on a project, it sounded like when he came in to the room, there was kind of some motivation to, like, sit down and we're gonna finish this song.
How did that work and how long did it take to record an album?
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah, we probably took over a year on each of the albums. And he would come over, we would try to schedule a couple of days a week where he'd come over for like 2 hours and we would just sit and work on the drums for one song and get that down, and then. And then we'd come back the next day and try to work on the bass and the guitar, and we just keep iterating at it over and over again. But having him sitting in the room with me was really wonderful. And I think, you know, I found doing it by myself, it was a lot harder to make that level of quality happen just by myself. Having him there to say, now, we could do that better, or me there to say, you could do that, you know, let's do that part again. Cause I think we could get it sounding even better. And I think that really helped. Having the two of us there really helped to push it to really sound good.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, every project that I collaborate on is better because I'm working with someone else and we're both throwing ideas in there. And I think collaboration is such a good thing. If you're a human who is built to be comfortable with collaboration, you can get a lot of joy out of it.
[00:15:43] Speaker B: And I think one of the things that really was great about it, too, is I felt like I want to impress Jude and Jude wanted to impress me. So we were always kind of trying to say, listen to this solo, man. And then we'd lay it out in our head, say, check out how great I can get this kick drum sounding, you know? And it just. That just was really. I think having that, that back and forth and just be able to look across the room and say. And see the excitement on their face when you nail something, you know, and just to be able to get excited about it together was, you know, that makes a huge difference for me.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that defines the true artistic spirit. And, you know, we do this for us first. Ideally, you know, you can go out there and say, I'm gonna be famous and I'm gonna be a famous musician, and then you probably will. But for, like, the artists who you, I think, are the most genuine, they're the ones who go out there and say, I'm going to make music. For me, that makes me excited. I'm going to make albums that I would want to listen to.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that definitely. I think everybody jives with that. I think people key into that very quickly that, is this genuine or is this not genuine? And if it's not genuine, you know, you're going to. You're not. Your people are not going to connect with it like they do something that really is an artistic statement from somebody.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: Definitely. Well, you know, I want to talk about the song, and we're going to play it in a second, but just tell me really quickly about how you wrote the song and maybe a little bit of some bits that will get people to really tune in and focus on it.
[00:17:16] Speaker B: Yeah. So this was called flabbergasted.
I was in Florida on vacation with my family, and I was in the shower, and all of a sudden a song came into my head that I. With all these crazy harmony vocals, and I had it in my head, and I was like, oh, my God, I've got to save this. I got to save this. And I had a little tape recorder that I had brought with me, and so I went dripping out of the shower and started singing all the various harmony parts of this song. And then I was trying to get the bass notes that went along with it so that I would. Would have the context to understand what I was trying to get in my head, because I know before I'd recorded some stuff, sometimes you'd lay something on a recorder and you'd listen back and you'd be like, I don't know what I was really doing there. So I tried my best to lay that all out, and I knew it was a good idea. So that is the core of what repeats over and over again in the song later on. I was never as good at the lyrical part as Jude was. A lot of my lyrics, especially back then, were pretty straightforward. So Jude actually helped me out with making some less direct lyrics and more Picasso esque lyrics that you might have to listen to and don't necessarily make direct sense, but they might make you feel something. And those are more of my favorite lyrics. So he helped me write the lyrics to it all the instruments on it. It starts off, actually with a. Jude had a toy top that you would wind up and it would turn centrifugal force. Um, and. But it whistled. And you can hear that. You'll hear that right in the middle of the song. So we threw that cool because he was just like, I want to get this in a song somewhere. So this is the one that ended up with, um, we have real bass. Uh, I think I play. Actually played the snare drum on this one, uh, horribly. And then, um. But it fit. Yeah. Yep. And then we got. I think we threw in some, like, I play the harmonica on there, so. And. And we just layered and layered and layered. I was listening to a lot of Brian Wilson at the time and the Beach Boys, so this was my. A lot of musicians go through this Beach Boys phase, so this was during my Beach Boys phase. And so, yeah, it's just layers and layers. A lot of it is this Elisa synthesizer that I had back in the day. So. But I think it had some really good sounding, sounding, like harpsichord sounds and things that we layered in here.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Well, I'm always excited to hear vintage or in between vintage and now sounds. And without any delay, we're going to play the track and we'll come back and talk about it.
[00:20:08] Speaker C: Wonder why you can never find a way to forgive though we aren't gonna die wouldn't be so wrong after the way we live but I know for sure that we can both get past it as soon as you stop pretending. You're so flabbergasted.
I wonder why we never try to say goodbye if it's goodbye, let's say goodbye just say goodbye goodbye.
[00:23:35] Speaker A: That's amazing. I love it. It's so Brian Wilson. But, you know, it reminds me of how someone takes the idea of Brian Wilson. All the layers. I love the reverb that you have from the lexicon reverb unit that you were telling me. So out of the box.
It's huge. It feels like a big verb. But you handle the bass beautifully, of course, and your voice sounds amazing and the phrasing and so whatever ideas you had, running out of the shower to a microphone, that's brilliant. So I'm glad you took the time and shared it with us. And one of the things that I wanted to mention is that you do have some of this music on a YouTube channel and somewhat digitally out there, so maybe you can just tell folks about where you can find it.
[00:24:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. Where can you find this? On the web? I think honestly, I don't.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Oh, good. Okay. So, folks, you can find it nowhere.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: Exactly.
Just relisten to the episode again.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: Exactly. That's the beauty of this, right?
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that. Yeah, this was definitely put out in the days before the Internet was around.
And this was. So we pulled. This was the middle, epic song in the middle of albums with some short. With an album, with some shorter songs, more peppy songs. So you just got the long album cut of the album. But, yeah, it's. It's. It. We did have somebody do for one of the songs. Somebody from University of Cincinnati did a really cool music video, and I think you've seen that. So that is out on YouTube someplace. But I think I need to make an effort to post some of this stuff.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Well, we'll all look forward to hearing more of it. Dave, thank you for being a part of the Nathan's and Ron cast. And just as a little side note, he is the one who houses and feeds Michael Roncat, right. Been mentioned on all the big episodes. So if you are a total fan of the Nathans and Ron cast, you know about Michael Roncat, and you've heard Dave's name. So. Dave, thank you for showing up and talking to me.
[00:25:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I appreciate it. I. I love. I love the hello world album. It's just absolutely fantastic. It's been on multiple repeat in my house, so I think you guys did some fantastic stuff there.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Coming from you, that means a ton. You can find all the Nathans and Ronstadt stuff online where the digital arms and branches and limbs reach. Find us out there. You can also go to nathansandronstadt.com and go to the podcast section, and you can listen to this episode and all the past 20 episodes we've done. And someday we'll get to 45 episodes. But we're not there yet, Dave. But when we get there, you can do it. Yes. So thank you and have a great day. Thanks.
