Hey I see you worked on Nellie Furtado's "Like a Bird". I like that track, although it's nothing like my regualr taste in music.

You have a typo in her name, though, I think.

You are indeed supremely talented. Was it fun working on those TV shows? Or was it stressful -are they actually live?

DOH! Thanks for catching that!

The live shows are mostly live. They are all filmed at about 3 in the afternoon. What you see during the show segments is actually live, but the segments are not recorded in that same order. The music is always recorded first, the interview segments are recorded based on the schedule of the celebrity, and the opening monologue is frequently recorded twice, once at the beginning of the taping, and then again at the end, with edits to make it fit the time remaining after then know how long the interviews took.

It's a very hard setup for performing music. The room itself, the TV studio, is totally dead. There are speakers for the studio audience, but they are turned WAAAAY down so that they don't interfere with the broadcast recording. As a result, the room has zero energy. We're on the stage, just rocking as hard as we can, trying to get people into it, and most of the time it's just blanks stares coming back at you.

About a third of the time, we're not really playing. Any time it was an awards show, it was fake to tape (the jargon for it is "stunt" - did you play on the grammys? yeah, but it was just a stunt gig). In those cases, the only thing that's actually going out live are the artist's lead vocals, and the drummer's cymbals. Everything else is tape.

The cymbals? Why, because you couldn't stop them even if you wanted to?

because a false cymbal hit is really, really obvious.

If I hit a different note on my keyboard than the one on the recording, maybe six people know. If the drummer forgets to hit that big crash cymbal on beat 3, but it's there on the recording, everybody knows.

Oh, I see. You could never get a drummer to reproduce the right cymbal parts on demand...unless he was Dave Grohl, tracking the cymbals seperately from a complete drums-only track to eliminate them bleeding into the other mics. In this case, he had to have each cymbal accent placed according to his pre-determined plan, or the finished track wouldn't make sense. Obviously it isn't usually orchestrated to this degree.

Also, you can also mic each component of you drumset and record each one on a separate track as you play the same part on top of itself several times over, and then go back and listen to see if your groove makes sense, i.e. did you groove with yourself?

But, Joe Schmoe on the Today Show, no, that's not happening.

usually, the problem is the other way - the drummer hits a cymbal he didn't hit on the recording, and if it's tape, nothing sounds.

drummers tend to play a lot more stuff live than they do in the studio, reaching for that extra hit, that extra splash, whatever.

Tru dat. Not much better than a pack of wild apes, that lot.

cheaper, usually, but just as likely to throw their own feces out into the crowd.

I often contemplated peeing into beer bottles behind my kit, but I never actually followed through with that plan.

Funny story, when Jethro Tull were touring Thick as a Brick, one of their pee-bottles behind a stack of amps got kicked over into the head of a rabbit costume which somebody later put on, unwittingly. These were the experimental days of stage performance.

I saw that tour. I miss those "experimental peformance" days. Peter Gabriel was the King of that shit.