I don’t have as many gigs these days but I’m finding that I’m spending time working on Godfrey Daniels sound archives for use on the DIY Live from Godfrey’s show. Thanks to sound guys from the past, Kris Kehr and Todd Denton, I’m recovering some of the great, forgotten shows from the past. In the past week or so, I’ve worked on Greg Brown, Claudia Schmidt, Gamble Rogers, Chris Proctor, Relativity, Johnny Cunningham, Patrick Ball, Chuck Pyle, Jim Post, Bill Miller, and more.
I enjoy the nuts and bolts of processing the sound files with Sound Forge: chopping and slicing, bleeping the f’s and s’s, eliminating the tuning, tightening up the patter, and simply working on the sine waves to create professional and enjoyable segments for radio airplay and for the GD archives in general. The process puts me in house after all these years. Time travel, for sure.
The club has also gained the ability to record each new evening and, through this process, broadcast on Tuesday the set from the immediate weekend before. Amazing.
I’m also able to pull out “singles” from the sets – one song wonders that work particularly well for the Tuesday shows. It’s an effort to keep the overall show crisp, varied and interesting. The LFGD show initially did a full hour of one particular show, and Dina and I have made an effort to cut the live sets down to 20 minutes. I’m taking that even further.
Some of the shows were in a packed house, and some were in front of a small crowd, and that shows up on the tapes. But the artistic quality of the shows is quite amazing. These folks consistently brought their their A-game to this club and that is what I take away from these sessions. Great performers.
I’m glad I have an outlet for this material with the radio show. Godfrey’s has had a hard time getting the local arts scene to understand what goes on in this room, and this is a great way to capture the magic that happens here. The club had started to broadcast live shows on Concert Window on the web, all a part of inviting folks into this club to experience that magic.
This process is part of what I do as an artist. It is less visible one, because I love to perform live. But I get great satisfaction in presenting the great folk performers I respect and their music with the people whether on the radio or here at Godfrey’s these many years. That’s why I celebrate the legacy of Godfrey Daniels and folks like Ramona, Mike Space, Dina Hall and all the volunteers who keep this place vibrant and alive.