Michael Ward, of California-based progressive rock band Michael Ward with Dogs and Fishes, told us about his love for his computer...
Michael Ward: Beyond the obvious necessities of my instrument, a '67 Telecaster and my voice, I have come to find my computer to be essential to my ability to function as a productive songwriter within the parameters of the life I find myself in. This is a strange admission for someone with a history of resistance to what I had come to regard as something of an intrusion in what I proudly considered an analog medium, music.
The compositional and editorial wonders of Pro Tools and like-minded platforms certainly brought me a long way in shedding my Luddite background, but it was the burrowing experience of finding myself landlocked in a basement in Wyoming for nine months during Covid,1200 miles from my studio, with a record I had been working on for a quite a while hankering for completion.
I began with the editorial tasks that seemed best suited to the situation, separated as I was by great distance from my engineer, and was quick to recognize that, in the Zoom world, there was not a great deal of difference in the process when the task involves staring at a screen and listening to the tracks we were working on. The need to be in the same room was strangely unnecessary, something that had occurred to me numerous times sitting in a well-equipped control room doing the same work with the same guy, and it worked quite well, without much of any feeling we weren't working at full capacity.
Soon we confronted the need to finish tracking, and I found that I could produce from a distance as well and that there's not much practical difference between directing a session from a great distance and punching a talk back button in a control room when both are viewed on a video screen, With a few tracks done in a local studio, which we Dropboxed back home, we wrapped it up as well as we would have under normal conditions, and sent it off to the guy in Nashville who's mixed my stuff for years.
I even managed the production of the CD package using the same process, and the record came out on schedule. I felt like a thoroughly modern guy.
With that in mind, the engineer I had worked with for years moved to Long Beach, some 400 miles distant, and we continued to work as a hybrid process; he travels for basics, and I do overdubs with local engineers. The editing is done online, as before. The new record is to be released on August 23.
Michael Ward With Dogs and Fishes' single "Big Bite" is out now.
(Photo credit: John Vigran)
