The Legend of Bonus Cricket, Mother's Day, Your Mom's Favorite DJ (Mastering Session)

Here's a kind of silly but true story.  In 2006, I released an album entitled "Your Mom's Favorite DJ".  It was my third album.  I had wanted it to feel like a continuous audio adventure (similar to the Scratchcratchratchatch tape).  Although it was going to be released on vinyl and CD, I wanted to it to run continuously like it would on a cassette.  Meaning no cue bands on the record, and no separate start IDs on the CD.  *remember this tidbit of info for later!*

This album clocks in at about 34 minutes.  Similar in duration to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. 

It took about 3 years to complete the album. It was a lot of fun to make and was recorded mostly on my brand new second hand 24 track Fostex reel to reel recorder.

Unlike the recording process of Carpal, which at times felt kind of high pressure for a young DJ/recordist (more on that in a later post), I wanted to make sure that this record was done from a slightly less tormented state of mind.  So I tried to squeeze as much fun out of making it as possible, from doing the scratches, to mixing, and even the final mastering session.

Mastering is a step in the record making process that some of you may or may not be aware of. It is the final stage of polishing a recording before it is released into the world. You show up with your stereo mixes of each track, then some final frequency equalization and possibly compression added. The goal is to make all the songs "fit" together in terms of sonics, loudness, balance etc.  The other goal is to make it sound more "finished" so that if any of it's songs were played next to another album, say a classic radio song from the Beatles or Bonnie Tyler, there would not be too much of a drop in volume or anything.

I'll get into the mixing of Your Mom's Favorite DJ in a future post but today I wanted to speak about the mastering session... which remains the most memorable record mastering session of my career. And, incidentally where "Bonus Cricket" was born. It was sunny day in New York City, though I wouldn't really know because we spent the entire day at The Lodge Mastering Studio... making stuff sound balanced and laughing our butts off the entire time. 

Our mastering engineer at The Lodge was Sarah Register, she was a friend of Terence Bernardo who I wrote about in the Giant Robot post, and she came highly recommended as both a top tier mastering engineer and a rad person.  We set a date and I travelled to New York City with Vid Cousins (who was the mix engineer on this album) to finally finish this album in all of it's 34 minute glory. 

You call these SONGS?!

Now a "normal" mastering session would usually consist of 2 main steps:

Step 1)  Finalizing balance on each of the album's songs which might include the same instrumentation throughout one or several of the songs.

Step 2)  Sequencing all the songs in the order that you want them played on the album. This includes precise timing of gaps, fade ins and fade outs between songs, adding start IDs for CDs etc.  

A standard album mastering session would usually consist of a final mix of 8 to10 songs.  

For context, here's the list of "songs" that we brought to New York to assemble that day, if you can't tell by the titles, none of these are songs:

SIDE 1

1) start heeeeeear's koala

2) stoppin traffic

3) tracks etc.

4) slewtest 1

5) lunch with Pavlov

6) robo-cookie factory

7) things'll be good again

8) dinner at 1:00 am

9) party at Eric's

SIDE 2

10) slew test 2

11) gimme a k!

12) mosquito vs. water buffalo

13) slew test 3

14) paper route days

15) nufonia noise consultation committee

16) the denouement

So clearly, not quite an album of 8-10 "songs"

There are Masters, and then there are MASTERS

I got a call from Sarah Register a week before the mastering session.

"Hey Eric, can you send me some reference albums that you like the mastering of so I can tune my ears a little before we meet next week?"

"Woah" I said (no mastering engineers had ever asked me that before). "Sure Sarah, but just to warn you, there are a whole bunch of little short tracks that are many different styles and genres.  Hope you're okay with that!"

"Sounds fun actually! Looking forward to it."

I sent her a list of a bunch of different things including albums from The Muppet Show, Black Sabbath, Public Enemy, De La Soul, Billie Holiday, some surf rock and different eras of film score stuff.  

Bright Lights Big City

I woke up extra early that morning in New York... just very excited to finally get this album finished!  Vid (mix engineer) and I had been mixing it for several weeks and I had been recording it for years before that. 

On the taxi ride from the hotel to the studio, I told the cab driver to stop at a bakery.  I picked up a bunch of red velvet cupcakes. I figured I needed to arrive bearing gifts... although this was going to be fun, it was (probably) going to be more work than your average mastering session. Plus, baked goods and music is always a good combination!

We arrived at the studio. It was beautiful, slick and very "Downtown" New York.  Wall to wall racks of pristine high end recording equipment. Nothing like the wire-y mess of "cable spaghetti" in my studio at home.  

The studio manager greeted us.  

"Hey welcome to The Lodge Studio. Sarah's prepping the studio for you.  So what are you guys working on today?"

"Mastering my next album."

"Great! what's the duration on that?"

"About 34 minutes."

"Oh awesome, you guys will probably be finished in about 3 hours. Have fun!"

We were given a tour of their amazing facility and finally arrived at Sarah's mastering studio. 

"Hey Sarah!  I brought us cupcakes!"

"Really! That's awesome!"

I noticed there was a small stack of CDs on the recording console, the top one of which I could see was The Muppet Show album. 

She noticed me looking at the CD and said "Yeah, I wasn't familiar with the mastering on some of the things on your list so I went to the record store to pick up some copies."

WHAT A PRO! Talk about being prepared and taking your work seriously. That's why I love Sarah! She's just an amazing human being and so committed to her craft!

We started to work on the mastering of the album. She was responsible for the "Mahna Mahna" type comedy fade before the second chorus of "Heeeeear's Koala" She was quick on the boards and her insane shelves of studio equipment! She tried a couple of fades and decided that this particular one was the funniest. We all agreed.

Another memorable moment for me was when we convinced her to put one of the dustier tracks through the vintage PULTEC tube EQs, that I'd only ever seen in photos of pro studios.  She told us she mostly liked how that device affected the brightness and "air" in the high frequencies. She demo'd it for us. I did the Pultec EQ victory dance! It sweetened the sound that much! 

Fast forward several hours, several tracks and many cupcakes later. It was 6 o'clock. We had almost tripled our scheduled time in the studio. The studio manager, walked by the door on  his way home and said, "Are you guys still here?! I thought you said this album was 30 minutes long?"

We all laughed and kept working... now about 6 hours overtime. 

But what's this got to do with crickets??

I thought it would be nice to put some crickets chirping at the end of the album.  Chirping crickets have always been quite a comforting sound to me. I had pet crickets when I was in grade school... Actually, I had a gecko, but it ate live crickets so we all kind of inhabited the same space until a few of us became gecko food.  

One of my favorite books from childhood was A Cricket In Times Square and here I was mixing/mastering the chirp of a cricket on my 3rd album many years later 10 minutes from Times Square! Oh those dots... they keep on connecting. 

Cricket sounds are also one of the three noises that the robot discovers for the first time in Nufonia Must Fall. One of the paradigm-shifting sounds he hears while on his date with Malorie. (more on that in a future post.)

But mostly, I thought it would be a nice way of ending an album after we had brought the listener through the roller coaster of an audio adventure such as Your Mom's Favorite DJ.  Just a little wink if any of them were at all confused by that point. Hopefully it would comfort them too. 

But why BONUS cricket??

By this point, we were totally delirious, hopped up on cupcake sugar, and over oxygenated from laughing at fades and gap timing edits all day. 

Vid had the idea that it would be good to have a 3rd start ID on the album.  Like a bonus track... but instead of a track it would be one cricket chirp. He also said we should master it so that it fades in from silence and fades out from silence. The reason for this was, at the time the iPod was all the rage, and the default "shuffle setting" was taking over the world. It would do a 2 second crossfade from one song to the next.  So if you were at a BBQ and someone's iPod was on shuffle it would fade out of [insert loud BBQ party jam] >> a couple seconds of silence >> just ONE cricket chirp >> a couple seconds of silence >> fade up on the [next loud BBQ party jam].  I don't know if we were just delirious or hungry for dinner, but we all agreed that this would be the funniest way to end the album and the mastering session. 

So Sarah got to work, and proceeded to fade clips around for 20 minutes until she got it just right! Sarah understands the importance of comedic timing. 

To this day, I've never heard bonus cricket in the wild during a BBQ playlist. But the fact that it may happen somewhere, someday...  is enough. 

Crickets til infinity!

Fast forward several years, the album is posted onto the digital platforms. Due to the fact that I wanted it to be a continuous "mixtape-like" listening experience with just 1 start ID per side, this 16 track album (in production for 3 years) with only 3 start IDs only qualified as an EP, not an LP. Therefore it goes to that price bracket I guess. (joke's on me!)

Still, because the label didn't want to choose an entire side of 8 tracks as the focus track, I guess it was decided "Bonus Cricket" would be the free-to-play "focus" track for the album. (joke's on you!)

But because everyone clicks on the focus track first, it has become the most popular thing on the album (joke's on all of us!)

So there you have it! The legend of Bonus Cricket and how it climbed it's way up the algorhythmic charts and into a BBQ playlist near you!

Thank you for listening!  Happy Mother's Day! 

Signed, 

Your Mom's Favorite DJ*

*now on all digital platforms

pick it up for your mom!

PS: if you do use a digital service like the one above, and are considering just buying "Bonus Cricket" for your mom, I would implore you to wait until you've at least saved up the other 2 bucks so you can just buy the whole album for her. I think it'll be a much better way to spend your music-listening money and she'll probably appreciate it more. Unless, of course, she hates scratching and only likes nature sounds. Then, by all means, go ahead and thank you for your support! Also... send me the digital receipt. I'd like to see that and I'll frame it and send one to Sarah and Vid.