[NEVER ENOUGH HOPE PERFORMING, TOBY SUMMERFIELD CONDUCTING]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: My name is Toby Summerfield. I’m a guitar player and bass player in Chicago.

One of the projects I do is called Never Enough Hope. It’s a very large group.

[NEVER ENOUGH HOPE PERFORMING, TOBY SUMMERFIELD CONDUCTING]

Well, we’ve recorded the band twice. The first time, everybody was in the same room and the strings were running through amplifiers, and there was a certain amount -- the mixing was very intricate for that it took like, I don't know, a year and a half of mixing to get it to sound like we wanted to. Having everybody in the same room helps with improvised sections and helps the like sort of musical interaction. The thing that was missing was clarity in a lot of the instruments. The saxophone sounded fine. The guitars sounded fine. The drums sounded really great. The strings and the vibes were kind of mushy.

From that experience, what we learned was the string have to be in a different room and have to be acoustic, and then we can turn them up as loud as we want in the mix. Likewise, the vibraphones have to be pretty far from the drums. At Electrical, we put the strings in isolation and we played in A room, which is a huge enormous room and just kinda set everybody as far apart from each other as we could. The hardest then is that I have to conduct everybody, cue everybody. So the strings were, you know I call it Kentucky, we’re in Kentucky which was directly behind me, and then the saxophones were here, and the vibraphones were way over in the corner, way over there, and then the trumpets were here, and the guitars were here, and the drummer were way over here. So, the way I did to get everybody’s attention, I had to do this like [GESTURES HIS PERSONAL CONDUCTING STYLE] you know, nearly I guess 360-degree thing. When I had to cue the strings I had to turn around and not look at the band; sometimes that worked, sometimes that was hard.

Yeah, recording -- The recording process was in and of itself was really positive. You know, the gear at Electrical is super high end, and being in Electrical is really great like -- just like some studios kind of suck your energy all day long. You’re sitting there and you’re waiting to play and you’re waiting for stuff to happen, and it kind of wears you out. I could have hung out at Electrical all day and not have been worried about if everybody felt really good. There’s a lot of napping going on.

We ended up and we did all the songs for the record. We got there 10. We were tracking at like three and people had to leave for the airport at five, and we finished it which again is a testament to the people playing it more than anything.

[NEVER ENOUGH HOPE PERFORMING, TOBY SUMMERFIELD CONDUCTING]

We recorded that to Pro Tools then because my thought process was this: That if we recorded to Pro Tools and we couldn’t get everything in its entirety right, you know. We performed it really well the night before, people were going to have to leave and there was going to be some amount of editing that was probably necessary to make it come out. We went to Pro Tools there for the sake of like after like post-production ease. In, you know, if I could have had my brothers, it would have been that we’ve had a couple of days, three or four days, and we could go to tape, and we could have a better mix going onto the tape so there would be less need to do elaborate mixing after the fact. I guess it is like the amount of automation that goes on in the mix for the 23 people, some of it is just to get it right, and some of it is to fix either errors on my part on dynamic conduction or just foibles in the recording process like this wasn’t as loud as it should have been or there’s too much trumpet in the vibes like at this point when we need to hear the vibes the most that you’d have to fiddle with the EQ and all that in this one specific spot, the power of Pro Tools there. If the band was better rehearsed and everybody knew the songs better, and I was more comfortable conducting at that point, I think the mixing would have been less elaborate because I could have brought people down more naturally.

That’s one of the things that I think that’s important to remember about recording is that when the technology that we all sort of pine for, the analog system stuff, bands were well rehearsed in a way that they’d be art now, especially you get into like avant-garde music and you get into free jazz or whatever, composition in contemporary music or whatever, you often have people who can’t rehearse that much because they’re very busy and they’re willing to work for free for their friends, but then they also have to have a job, so you have this like unbelievably tight schedule all day long, so the rehearsals are very limited and the music can be very challenging. So, what you get sometimes are somewhat ramshackle performances that are the best you can get because you can’t demand that much of your friends like they’re your friends and your peers and they’re really great musicians, and they’re choosing this spiritually and artistically rewarding path that has no real financial reward as you can’t expect eight hours rehearsals every day from them. Pro Tools is great for that because if you have a strong -- if you understand your composition, you can get them to deliver it in the best possible way with very little rehearsal.

What would be great is if I can take this band and really feel like it’s my instrument, after a while like I’m really in control of it and they really all understand their roles in it, then we can go somewhere and record to tape, and nail takes in a -- with a level of detail that I haven’t experience in band before like where I can really control the dynamic and everybody knows their job and they nail it.

I think there’s a comparison to be made to like Zappa’s band because of the similarly erratic or esoteric instrumentation. They understood their job like or horns in a big band like in a jazz band, they know when to be quiet and when to be loud, and you learn that especially if you record a lot more too. You know, people who worked in big bands for 30 years spend a lot of time in a studio in a big band and knew what they had to do to make the recording go better. I think maybe Pro Tools is it loosens some shackles but it also we lost some skill as musicians in how to use the studio as an instrument to. I would love to record the band to tape. That would be a dream.