Home Recording Blog:
~ January, 2006


Other Diary Entries... 
In The Beginning... 
Beginners Start Here 
The Keyboard is King! 
~ My Keyboard Family 
I Wanna be Eight Again 
Getting the Perfect Take 
Dare To Be Different  
Dare To Be Different #2 
Read The Flaming Manual! 

Radio Adelaide Interview

INTRO SONG: THE LIBERTY CAFE

DAVID LONG: A brand new production from Jim Lesses, who is in the studio. A very good afternoon to you…

JIM LESSES: …and a very good afternoon to you as well, yes.

DAVID LONG: Welcome. I’m fascinated by this, because having been a sound recording engineer for quite a few years, twenty plus I think it was, I know the technology that we had for recording was phenomenal. But now you do it all on a computer…

JIM: You can. Yes, it’s incredible what you can do with a fairly basic system. I certainly don’t have… I mean it’s fairly up-to-date, but not state of the art by any means. A reasonable microphone, a tiny little mixer, and away you go. For me the last 18 months has just been an absolute ball. You just can’t believe how much…

DAVID: Huge learning curve…

JIM: Oh, huge learning curve. I had no idea. I mean, I’d been in the studio to do my first album, but there I was just, you know… now is the time to sing, and you’d sing and strum your guitar, and other people would take care of all the engineering and the mixing, and all that sort of stuff, and I would just sit in the background and go, oh yeah, that looks sort of interesting. And then I sat down one day to see if I could do something – with a bit of home recording, and I was surprised that… the learning curve, like you say has been huge, but being fairly familiar with computers I thought, I’ll give it a go.

And… some of the songs, I listen to them now and go, you know, that was like eighteen months ago, and [compared to] what I’ve done six months ago, there’s a big difference. Basically, I’ve been absolutely delighted with what I’ve been able to achieve and I’m just looking forward to…

DAVID: For all those people sitting at home, I mean, a computer is like, that box in the corner that a lot of people don’t quite understand. You’re familiar with what computers do, as I am, but what sort of a software program were you using?

JIM: It started out as basically a shareware program called Cool Edit... Cool Edit Pro, and Adobe have now bought that out, so they obviously thought the program, the company was very good…

DAVID: Oh yeah, we use it here…

JIM: That’s right. And now they call it Adobe Audition. And unfortunately, all the shareware versions of Cool Edit have disappeared off the Net, but there are obviously places you can find it, but it’s a terrific program for what you were able to do, and still are able to do with it. I just, you know, get in a have a go. If it sounds stupid, nobody else has to know, you delete it and have another try until you get something vaguely sounding like what I can hear in my head, that’s the sound I’m going for, and keep moving.

DAVID: What sort of speakers were you using to mix to?

JIM: I’ve bought a couple of Alesis near-field monitors.

DAVID: Yes…

JIM: They’re about $1800 for a pair…

DAVID: That’s the secret of it all in the end.

JIM: That’s right, yes… For a while I was… a lot of people say you can just use a good pair of headphones, but you can’t. You need a really good pair of speakers to be able to hear the quality as well.

DAVID: Obviously you put it out, so you must be happy with it. What advice would you give to anybody else?

JIM: Have a go. It’s just been… you can’t go wrong basically. The trick for me is… one of the things I use to remind myself to enjoy what I’m doing is (and it may sound a bit silly): Be as a child.

I have a song on my first album called, I Want to be Eight Again, and so the theory for me is – just have a go. Kids just have a go. They have fun. They don’t care whether it’s right or wrong, or it works or it doesn’t, as long as they’re getting in there having fun with whatever they’re having a go at. And that’s what I have in the back of my mind. And I think, just do it. if it works, it’s great. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter -  no-one else has to know about it, if it doesn’t sound right.

DAVID: And you haven’t spent a fortune on it.

JIM: Well, funnily enough I’ve probably spent more than I thought I would, but hopefully over a period of years, it’ll get cheaper is I go, because once you've got that initial investment, which I’ve probably spent several thousand dollars, with the computer and the speakers and a AU$600 dollar microphone and things like that; a little mixer. So you have to make that…

DAVID: But those are one off…

JIM: That’s right. So you have to make that initial outlay, and then as you just keep doing it, it gets cheaper – but then with technology of course, you go: well, now maybe I need a better microphone, or a faster computer, or… so it never gets cheaper…

DAVID: It’s called, American Dream. And Jim Lesses, who a lot of you in the folk scene around Adelaide will know… he’s done other things in the past but this is a work of love, as you can tell it… here’s another track from that album.

SONG: A MODERN CHIEF EXECUTIVE

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