Thanks for listening to “One Man Band,” by Reo Casey. Here are some notes on how I made this album.

 

This is a long, boring document but I wanted to write all this down so I don’t forget it. 

 

My Home Recording Practice

 

My practice of home recording began when I was a kid and I got my first computer recording interface. I have recorded a couple of hundred songs with the goal of getting better at recording, performing and producing. I maintained a pace of roughly one song per month, on average, for roughly twenty years. A couple of years before the pandemic, my friend Santos bought a tape machine and left it with me. After getting a new motor put in the machine and getting it up and running, I realized how much I love recording on tape and decided to use the tape machine to make an album. I had never really released any of my home recordings but I figured that having the tape machine would be a good catalyst to help me complete an album that I would put out under my own name. I recorded most of this album in the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024 and I’m finally getting around releasing it in 2025.

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Evan Runyon

 

Lots of people contributed to this album indirectly but the only person besides me to actually participate in the tracking sessions was Evan Runyon. Evan is a great musician, person, and an old friend. I initially asked him to come run the tape machine because I thought that recording on the tape machine would be a two-person job. It turned out that the Tascam 388 is easy enough to use that I can record myself without any issues. However, it was still great having Evan around because of his general expertise. He helped me figure out some of the EQ settings for various tracks and we tried out different mics on some sound sources. I trust his ears and it was great getting his take on how things were sounding. Evan worked for about three days doing tracking sessions on this record and, during that time, we worked on about five of the songs that made it onto the finished product. He also played some of the hand percussion tracks on M.A.D. These tracking sessions were done in 2023. In 2024, we did a mix session at Evan’s home studio. Evan mixed all the songs and then I messed with these mixes quite a bit after the fact. Between his skilled mixing and my meddling, all the mixes eventually got done.

 

Tape Machine 

 

The tape machine is a Tascam 388. It has a built-in console and it features eight tracks on ¼” tape. The eighth channel didn’t work for any of the making of One Man Band.The machine’s small track width and the max speed of 7.5 inches per second (half or a quarter of the industry standard tape speed) result in a fairly lo-fi sound. I personally like the sound of this machine a lot, even though I’m still learning the finer points of how to use it. Quite a bit of “One Man Band” was recorded through the built-in preamps in the Tascam 388’s console. 

 

Outboard Gear

 

There were two pieces of outboard gear used extensively on this project. One was the Universal Audio LA-610. Mine is the first version and came to me via Sonny Collie who used it in his home studio. The other piece of outboard gear I used on just about every song is the Echofix EF-X3. This unit is basically a very fancy version of a Roland Space Echo. I used the EF-X3 in the Tascam’s effects loop. It has nice spring reverb and tape delay. Besides that, I used a Warm Audio Pultec knock-off for a couple of bass tracks.

 

Recording Techniques and Equipment

 

I recorded as many of the instrumental tracks to tape as I could. On some songs, I would run out of tape tracks. There was even one song (M.A.D.) that I recorded fourteen tracks on tape and synced them all up digitally. When I would run out of tracks on the tape machine, I would output all of those tracks on tape to the input of my computer’s recording interface. Once all my tape tracks were in the computer, I recorded any remaining parts digitally.

 

 All the vocals were done digitally, mostly because they’re usually the last part in a song that I record. There was absolutely no auto-tune used to make this record but you probably could have guessed that. That being said, I did edit the vocal tracks quite a bit because vocals are still my worst instrument. My eventual goal is to record everything to tape with minimal editing but, to do that, I’ll either have to get another tape machine with more tracks, or start recording with an ensemble “live in the studio.” 

 

Drums 

 

For quality control reasons, all the drum tracks on this album were done with a metronome. I would use my phone to record myself playing the song on guitar and then I would use that phone recording to figure out the tempo in beats per minute. That’s how I would know what tempo to set the metronome on. As you can hear, this mostly worked but some of the songs are +/- 5bpm off. I found it really hard to consistently replicate the rhythmic “feel” of a real ensemble. In a real band, the song’s tempo is always a little bit of a compromise. It is an average of the rhythmic sensibility of the band members. Sometimes, this results in a song “finding” its own ideal tempo by committee. I wasn’t able to do this so I tried to approximate it using the aforementioned tap-tempo method. 

 

Pretty much all the drum tracks were done using a late sixties Ludwig Super Classic drum kit and a Dallas Drum brass snare with diecast hoops. Hi hat cymbals were 1950s Avedis Zildjian and the ride was a 21” Sabian Groove Ride that used to belong to my friend Jimmy Pendleton (RIP). Various crashes and sizzle cymbals were used to augment this setup. Pretty much all the drum tracks were recorded with a Beyerdynamic 201 on the snare and a Carvin kick drum mic inside the kick drum, along with a bath towel laying inside the drum shell to tame some of the overtones. This carvin kick mic also came to me from Sonny Collie. Some drum tracks also had a pair of Mojave MA200 tube mics in a Glyn Johns type configuration about 35” away from the snare mic. I would have used these overhead mics on every song but I was worried about running out of tracks on the tape machine. 

 

Bass 

 

After the drum track was done, I would typically move on to a guitar or bass track. For whatever reason, I didn’t play any upright bass on this album. All the bass was done with my Squier P Bass with a seymour duncan quarter pounder pickups and heavy gauge flatwound strings. Some of the bass tracks were done directly into my UA LA-610 channel strip and some of them were done using a clone of a Fender 59 Bassman amp. This amp was mic’d with the carvin kick drum mic. Sonically, I think the bass tone is the weak link on One Man Band. For a variety of reasons, I just hadn’t yet figured out how to record bass on the Tascam 388. I think that, on this album’s planned sequel, the bass will sound a lot better. 

 

Guitar

 

Guitars abound on this album. I used my 1963 Gibson ES-330 for Let the Good Times Roll and the slide parts on M.A.D. My 1958 Danelectro U-1 makes an appearance on Henchman. The most used guitar was my 1983 Tokai Strat copy. My Nash Telecaster Custom might have made it on to one of the songs but I can’t remember. My 2011 Gibson ES-339 (maybe my favorite guitar) only made it onto one song - M.A.D. The Leslie sound on “Let the Good Times Roll,” is a Leslie Model 16 being driven by my Acoustic G60T amp. 

 

There are a lot of amps on this record. At the beginning of the project, my friend Mike Morgan was nice enough to lend me his 1964 Super Reverb and his 1955 Fender Deluxe. However, by the end of the project, I had found my own 64 Super Reverb and also a Victoria Ivy League. All four of these amps made it onto the album. Anson Funderbugh’s 64 Super Reverb was here at one point and I believe it made it on to M.A.D. Be on the lookout for my TED Talk on 1964 Super Reverb amps. Most of the guitar tracks were done with Shure SM57s. The Leslie 16 was mic’d with Sterling Audio ST-44 Mics. In my opinion, the best guitar tone I got on this album was feeding the signal from the Tokai Strat into both the Victoria Ivy League and my 1964 Super Reverb. Those amps compliment each other perfectly but it was really challenging to get the signals from both mics in phase. 

 

Guitar pedal use was minimal. The solo on Deep Ellum Blues is done through an old MXR envelope filter that used to belong to Sonny Collie. I probably used an Ernie Ball passive volume pedal at some point.

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Keys 

 

Keyboards on this album are all pretty straightforward. All the piano tracks were done on a Charles Walter upright which was passed from friend Suzanne Cesar to my friend Kevin Schermerhorn and then to me. All the piano tracks were recorded using the two Sterling Audio ST-44s aimed at the piano soundboard. The Rhodes was done using my 70s Rhodes 76. I think I amplified it with the Super Reverb.

 

The glockenspiel on M.A.D. is a century-old Deagan that I got from Goodwill. Come to think of it, I think all the instruments on this record are “real.” No software instruments were used at all.

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Vocals

 

Vocals were all done through a Mojave Audio MA-200 into the UA LA-610 Channel strip. 

 

Mixing

 

I’m not a fan of mixing. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good mix. I just don’t like to be the one doing it, especially when it comes to my own music. My goal is to make the unprocessed tracks sound so good that minimal mixing is needed. I don’t think I achieved that on One Man Band, at least overall. A lot of mixing was needed, especially on the songs with more parts. I did all the mixing “in the box,” using Cockos’ Reaper on my PC. If I had my way, I’d do away with the computer entirely but, for now, it’s prohibitively expensive. Like I said earlier, Evan also helped a lot with the mixing. He basically mixed all the tracks correctly and then I undid a lot of his work, mostly because I was trying to counteract the bad bass tone I had recorded. Oh well, you live and you learn. 

 

There was hardly any editing on the instrumental tracks but some of them took quite a few tries for me to get right. Some songs had to be done several times in their entirety until they clicked. As stated before, most of the editing done on these songs was on the vocal tracks. Additionally, we removed a single chorus of the solo in “Let the Good Times Roll,” because the guitar’s intonation was so off that one of the chords I played sounded very out of tune, even though the guitar was in tune without any notes being fretted. We felt the song was a bit too long anyway and the removal of one chorus ended up making the whole song flow better. 

 

One more thing that I should say is that the solo on “Henchman” is the only time that we created a Leslie effect using a plugin. This was Evan’s idea and I think he implemented it very well. We did this because I had originally automated crazy panning on that solo (inspired by Hendrix and Eddy Kramer’s Electric Ladyland mixes) but it ended up being way over the top. The rotary plugin used on this solo was Evan’s way of maintaining the psychedelic vibe while maintaining a reasonable balance between the stereo channels. 

 

Mastering

 

George Guerin and I are both in Marcy’s band. He has a mastering studio called DES Mastering that’s right here in Dallas and he mastered One Man Band. I think he did a great job evening out the weird, lo-fi mixes that I gave him. That’s all I can really say because I wasn’t present for the mastering sessions. I didn’t have to be though because George knows his stuff and has mastered tons of albums, as you can see on his website. 

 

Songs

 

1. Hopped Up

   1. This is an original instrumental tune. I could almost say it’s a contrafact of Sen-Sa-Shun by Freddie King because it’s in the same key and it has a similar bassline and drum beat. As the title suggests, it’s on the faster side. Like countless other guitarists, I’m continually inspired by Freddie King’s guitar-led instrumental music and wanted to try writing my own. 

2. Big Boss Man

   1. This song was originally recorded by Jimmy Reed in 1960 and its writing is credited to Luther Dixon and Al Smith. This song became a standard and was covered by tons of people including Elvis Presley. However, the cover that really inspired me was Erma Franklin’s version which came out in 1967. My version is kind of based on hers but also deviates from it in some ways.

3. Preacher

   1. This is another song that I wrote the same afternoon as “Headstrong Heartweak.” Like that song, it was intended for Amy to sing but I liked how it turned out so I decided to record a version with me singing it. 

4. Headstrong Heartweak

   1. Another cool singer I work with from time to time is Amy Dowling. At one point, we were looking for material to perform together and I spent a couple of hours writing some songs that might work for her to sing. This was one of those songs. I think the title is inspired by something I read in a book years ago but I can’t remember when I read it or what I was reading. I liked how this song turned out so I decided to record this version with me singing on “One Man Band.”

5. Pistola 

   1. I originally wrote this tune in 2018 when I was reading a biography of Thelonius Monk. I kept thinking about putting bebop melodies in surf music. I was playing bass with Holland K Smith and we were doing tons of surf music. I was also seeing quite a bit of live jazz because D/Fw is full of great jazz. This song was the result of all that. I named it Pistola in homage to the name of Sue Foley’s band of which I am currently a member.

6. Whiskey & Coke

   1. This song was written by Marcy Rodsky and Dave Burris. When Dave retired, I took his spot in Marcy’s band and this song stayed in the repertoire. I always liked this song in particular so I decided to record a cover. I rewrote the verse after the guitar solo and changed a few of the words to fit my own version. 

7. Let The Good Times Roll

   1. This song was originally popularized by Louis Jordan and his band in 1946. It subsequently became a standard and many cover versions have been recorded. As a sideman, I had played this song with several different groups and at jams. Everyone seems to do it a little differently and, for my version, I went for a faux-organ-trio sound with the leslie-effect guitar taking the place of the organ. 

8. Henchman 

   1. My father in law was a teenager in the late sixties and one time we started talking about youth subcultures in the Dallas area during that time. He said something about dressing like a “henchman” so I wrote this song kind of imagining what that might be like. I wrote this song the night before I recorded the instrumental tracks and I had to finish the words a couple of weeks later. I wanted to go in a psychedelic rock direction for this song because of the subject matter.

9. Jack O Diamonds

   1. This is a traditional gambling song. It was recorded ninety nine years ago by Texas’ own Blind Lemon Jefferson but the song is much older than that. There have been covers recorded by artists in genres such as blues, country, and bluegrass. When doing my version, I went in an early seventies rock direction and used verses from many different existing versions of the song. The chord progression I used was based on the great version of this song recorded by Odetta in 1956.

10. M.A.D.

    1. Macabre Anachromatic Dramatization. I was inspired by T.V. theme songs from black-and-white shows like the Munsters and The Addams family, among others. When I tried to write my own, this is what I ended up with. This is the only song on this album which features an instrumental part played by someone other than me. Evan Runyon did some of the hand percussion. The hand percussion instruments used include shakers, cowbell, a folding chair, and bones. 

11. Deep Ellum Blues

    1. Deep Ellum is a neighborhood in Dallas that recently turned 150 years old. It seems that, for its entire existence, people have had opinions about it. The song “Deep Ellum Blues” was first recorded around a century ago and warns visitors to this neighborhood about its various hazards. As a working musician in Dallas, I perform in Deep Ellum from time to time and I can tell you from experience that it hasn’t necessarily mellowed out that much since this song was originally written. My version of this song evolved quite a bit over the course of doing a few demos of it. It was originally closer to Freddie King’s “Big Leg Woman” but ended up going towards what I would call the predominant sound of today’s deep ellum, Neo Soul. 

12. Lucille

    1. This song was originally recorded by Little Richard in 1957. I have been singing this song since I was in high school. No one on the planet can really sing like Little Richard but I got to see Nick Curran come very close. I have been chipping away at my own version for years and finally got around to recording it on this album. 

 

Thanks

 

Even though this album is called “One Man Band,” no band nor man is an island. There are quite a few people I would like to thank. One is my superlative wife Laura. I can’t say enough about how great she is and I couldn’t have done this without her. Same can be said of my parents David and Ann. I want to thank Evan Runyon for being willing to work on this weird DIY project with me and for all his insights. I want to thank Cathy Collie for cutting me a deal on some of her late husband Sonny’s recording equipment, which I used extensively in making this album. I want to thank Mike Morgan for all the gear he loaned me and his insights. I want to thank all the musicians I have worked with who are always inspiring me and teaching me new things. I’d like to thank our neighbors for putting up with some racket, although I tried to keep it to a minimum. I’d like to thank Santos for letting me use his tape machine for this project, Suzanne and Kevin for the piano, and everyone else who has given or loaned me gear. I want to thank all the patrons who allow me to be a professional musician and everyone who has helped me get to this point.