ARTIST: Dick Gaughan
TITLE: Outlaws & Dreamers
LABEL: Greentrax Recordings
GENRE: Folk
SOURCE: CD
BITRATE: 149 kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 50:11
RELEASE DATE: 2001-00-00
RIP DATE: 2010-01-24
Track List
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1. The Yew Tree 5:08
2. Florence in Florence 2:31
3. Dowie Dens o Yarrow 5:57
4. Tom Joad 5:38
5. Outlaws and Dreamers 4:18
6. When I'm Gone 3:43
7. John Harrison's Hands 5:14
8. What You Do With What You've 3:18
Got
9. Tom Paine's Bones 3:45
10. Strong Women Rule Us All 6:38
11. Wild Roses 4:01
Release Notes:
"In early 2001, I was involved in a discussion on the Usenet newsgroup,
uk.music.folk, concerning the difficulties involved in live recording and in
creating a "live" feel in studio recording.
I have done a live album and have made many studio albums and the feel is
different. After the discussion was over, I kept thinking about the subject and
began to wonder how close I would be able to get to the feel of a live
performance in the studio.
Live and studio recording are two completely different beasts. In a live
performance, there are several factors which create the live feel - for example,
the presence of an audience and the pressure of having to get it right first
time, the acoustic properties of the venue etc - and these do not exist in a
recording studio, particularly when the performer is solo. Yes, it is possible
to reproduce the acoustics of a concert hall but it seemed to me that the
problem was less a technical one than a perceptual one on the performer's part.
The essential factor in a live concert is the pressure on the performer - there
are people listening and watching as the performance is taking place and it
would generally be unacceptable for the performer to stop in the middle of a
piece and say, "Sorry, but I think I can do this better" and start again. The
level of concentration required is very high and is, in large measure, generated
by the various pressures. The kind of concentration generated under studio
conditions is very different as the pressures are very different.
The priority in live performance is to get as good as possible in one playing of
the piece; the priority in the studio is to get as close to perfect in as many
playings as it takes.
It seemed to me that perhaps one method of creating a comparable pressure to
that of a live performance might be to give myself a much tighter deadline than
I usually set.
I do not go into a recording studio with a fixed plan. I rarely do arrangements
in advance, sometimes I don't even have a complete list of songs. I believe a
recording studio is a creative tool and so I leave plenty scope for accidents,
for serendipity to open new doors, for the creative energy to take me down roads
I might otherwise have missed. And I thought that using my normal approach to
recording, but compressing the entire process into a very tight time limit,
might be the key.
Normally, I would allow around 21 days actual recording and approximately one
day per track, plus a couple of days, for final refining, mixing and mastering.
With this album, the entire arranging, recording. mixing and mastering were done
in 40 hours. Four of the songs were established in my repertoire, another I
hadn't sung in 30 years, two more I had sung only a handful of times and had no
fixed arrangement for, the instrumental piece I had never played in public, and
the other three I had never sung - in fact, two of them still didn't have tunes
when I started recording.
This was the result, warts and all. I didn't allow myself time to think about
anything other than the emotional content of the music and so, yes, there are
technical things which normally I would have tried to eliminate. It is
completely raw and therefore, I believe, as honest as anything I've ever done."
www.dickgaughan.co.uk