Roger McGuinn is known to most people as the leader of The Byrds, the folk-rock band from the '60s who fused Bob Dylan and folk music with the rush of jangley rock and roll.
He was interested in technology back then, being one of the first people on the West Coast to purchase a Moog modular synthesizer. Years have gone by but some things never change. Roger is still combining the old and the new, using computer recording technology and the internet to preserve old-time folk songs from years ago. His most recent album, Treasures from the Folk Den, was culled from sessions recorded on his computer as he and his wife Camilla traveled around the East Coast visiting friends like Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Odetta and Judy Collins. The songs are chosen from his growing Folk Den archive of "rescued" folk songs at mp3.com and on his own site, mcguinn.com. The preservation of this important music is a noble cause, and it's great to see that some of our rock and roll heroes can move into their 60s with grace and their love of music intact
I guess you should state what your goals are, as far as preserving songs, so that our readers understand that.
Yeah, that is my goal — to keep the old traditional songs alive, because to the current marketplace they are in danger of getting lost. It's the same problem that was happening in the '30s when the Lomaxes went out to do the field recordings. There is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt saying that there is a chance of these old folk songs getting lost 'cause of music hall songs. Of course music hall songs have been lost now, but the old folk songs are still around, so it was kind of ironic.
Do you find that many times you'll be looking at a song and there's numerous different versions? Do you just kind of go with gut feelings and pick a favorite?
Yeah I actually choose the verses that I like the best. So I'm modifying them a little bit too. I figure it's fair game.
It's already happened for many, many years before.
You can't do all the versions so you might as well pick the one you like the best.
I like the liner notes a lot on Treasures from the Folk Den.
Thanks. You know I did that project with a Dell tower computer? I've got it down to a laptop now — Toshiba. I'm using the same Cool Edit Pro, but they've got a Version 2 now that has 128 tracks of digital audio. It does some more tricks — it has MIDI and video editing capabilities too. Basically I use it for digital audio. I just use it like a big multitrack recording machine.
What were you using when you did the first Folk Den recordings?
I used a DAT machine for the very first one. And then to overdub it I would sing along with the DAT and dub it, at 44kHz, onto my PC - probably a 166mHz PC at the time. I have a lot of songs on the early part of the Folk Den that I cannot reproduce. There are actually no masters because it was all done on the fly.
Did you begin to do all the recording in the computer later on?
The original Folk Den stuff was all very simple. It was 11 kHz, 8 bit, and I did that for a reason: Because bandwidth was so slow back then. People had 300 to 1200 baud modems, they couldn't download anything bigger than like a megabyte — that was really a big file. So I tried to keep it under 300 kilobytes for the whole thing.
I noticed on the versions that I got on CD-R from MP3, that they were kind of grainy sounding, and I was wondering if that was just the quality of the MP3.
Well MP3s are grainy sounding. It's a ten to one compression. It's like jpeg compared to a tiff file or something. In all this belly aching that the record companies are doing about file sharing, they don't mention the fact that MP3s don't sound as good as CDs. They ought to make that clear to people, 'cause there's a big difference.
Oh, exactly.
And they burn these CDs at mp3.com from the MP3s. There are artifacts in them — you can hear a lot.
I was curious about that.
Plus they are very simple recordings. With not a very good microphone...
What kind of mic?
I think I was just using a Shure Brothers SM58, or something, when I first started, and now I'm using a Stedman [1100B] tube condenser mic that's much more high fidelity.
With some of the gear that you've gotten, like the Cool Edit and the Stedman, were you getting endorsements?
I actually got the Stedman and the Cool Edit for free. I contacted them. The Stedman actually fell into my lap. This other musician was borrowing it and he emailed me that it was a great mic, and asked me if I wanted to evaluate it, and I said, "Yes." So they sent it to me for evaluation and then I talked to the guy who owned the place and said that I loved it and he said, "You know what, keep it." [laughs] So it was great. He said, "I just want you to make a statement that you like it and put it on your web site." And I did. It's a wonderful mic, it sounds like an old Telefunken.
I've never used any of Stedman's tube mics, I've just used some of their dynamic mics — they're really good.
Well there's a big difference. The tube mic is much warmer — you can hear the glow come out of it. Mics are wonderful. It's like the kind of brush you use, or film you use in a camera.
At this point what do you use going into the PC?
Well, I was just going in through the soundcard. I had a Yamaha SW1000XG soundcard. It was capable of doing 96 kHz and 24 bit. I was just going in through the little 1/8" jack in the back, the little stereo jack. But now I've got a thing called the Edirol UA-1A — it's a USB interface. It's got some RCA input tracks on it. I was using a Mackie [mixer]. I still have that, I use that at home. For the road, when I go out I've got a really small, two channel [mixer]. It's got two XLR inputs, so I can record two condenser mics at the same time. It gives phantom power — it's a Behringer. I just got that recently and I haven't used that yet. I've used it around the house, but I haven't taken it on the road.
After traveling around and making the Treasures from The Folk Den record did you reevaluate what gear would work better?
Yeah. Actually I broke the flat screen on the way back. This was clunky, carrying a tower and a flat screen around, so I tried to get it down to a laptop, and I did. I was able to get a laptop with a CD burner built into it and enough storage. Actually, with the CD burner it's got infinite storage. I've got a twenty gigabyte drive on it, so it's plenty of room. To record in Cool Edit Pro, usually a session will take up a gigabyte or so. That's with maybe ten or fifteen tracks of digital audio.
Have you done more sessions since the Treasures... album came out? Going to visit people?
Um, not really for a new Treasures... — I haven't started that yet. I've just done the Folk Den stuff.
You're still posting some of those?
Every month. I haven't missed a month since 1995. You have to check my site instead of mp3.com. Check mcguinn.com and go to the Folk Den — there's a logo on the left hand corner. Over almost eighty songs right now.
Maybe you're more prolific now then you ever were.
Yeah, one a month, yeah it adds up, after a while.
How did you start learning to upload songs as MP3s?
Well I started putting out the Folk Den songs in wav. file format, and then a guy who was running the University of North Carolina site contacted me and said he had Real Audio. So he invited me to come over there with it and I did. Then mp3.com contacted me and said that they liked my stuff and they wanted me to put a couple of tracks up on their site, and make some CDs while I was at it, and I did. You know, at first I was kind of skeptical, I was going, "Ummmm. What does is this entail and what am I going to get out of it?" It was so simple and the deal was so straightforward and non-exclusive — and fifty percent to the artist. I'd never heard of such a thing.
Did they kind of walk you through any of the technical end of it?
Not really. There's a kind of a wizard when you go into the site that helps you out with it. It wasn't hard.
What are your plans right now for the future?
Another ...Folk Den CD and this time focus on artists in their twenties and thirties. Younger folk singers. Jeff Tweedy is the only name that comes to mind right now, although we have a list of them that we haven't contacted yet. That's my plan, to do another, 'cause I have eighty songs to draw from and I've only done about eighteen of them. So you know there are several more CDs in there. I could even specialize and do all blues, or all cowboy songs, or all sea shanties or whatever.
Do you spend a lot of time looking up old music for your songs?
Well no. Every month when it comes time, a deadline to do another one, I'll get into it. I've got tons of folk books. Also I surf the net — see what's out there that strikes my fancy. Usually they're songs that I've known for, thirty, forty years. 'Cause I learned a lot of songs back when I was a teenager at the Old Town School of Folk Music. It's a great institution.
With your studio now, do you have a space set up? Is it really a den?
Yeah, it's kind of a den. It's an office and there are guitars on the walls and computers — three or four computers in here, microphones and mixing stuff and things like that. It's not soundproofed like a real studio. So when the gardener's out there you have to cool it for a while. It hasn't really been a big problem. It always amuses me. I think back to Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever album. They recorded that in Mike Campbell's garage and there was no insulation there at all. There were planes flying over and dogs barking, and they just kind of worked around it. I think it's one of his best albums.
You get a different vibe working in a place like that.
Yeah. Plus the vibe in the studio is kind of cold and informal and downright frightening if you're on the artist's side of the glass. People are talking about you and you can't hear them, and the red light goes on and then your paying like three or four hundred bucks an hour — it's kind of an uncomfortable thing.
When was the last time you did outside studio sessions?
We used the studio for a tribute to Pete Seeger album called Where Have all the Flowers Gone? I guess that was about four years ago. I go down to Full Sail. They've got a great studio...
Oh, at the school there?
Yeah, it 's a school and they have a good studio. So I use that if I need a studio for anything.
Have you played around with editing or comping tracks much?
Well sure, I do it all the time. I fly things... back on reels we used to fly stuff, like guitar parts and things like that, and that was straight tape, but we were using a drum machine as a sampler. We recorded onto the sampler and moved it over to different places on the actual multi-track tape. Terry Melcher did some flying stuff back on California Dreamin' with my guitar part in that, we moved that around. The first experience I had with digital audio recording was when Terry Melcher invited me out to California to work on a Beach Boys album. I got to his house in Carmel and he had a Pro Tools setup. That was the first I'd ever seen of that.
What year was that?
I think it was '91. His engineer had like twelve gigabytes worth of optical storage. I guess it must have been a really slow Mac, I can't imagine they had very good Macs at that point, you know. But it worked. He did a whole Beach Boys' album with Pro Tools, even using the MIDI for a lot of the instruments. That part sounded like it — I've never heard a MIDI track that didn't sound like a MIDI track.
Kind of stiff and sterile.
They're always. Even the sounds of the instruments aren't real, they just sound MIDI to me. I can hear them a mile away, "Oh man, that's a MIDI track." But these days on hit radio it doesn't seem to matter. People have come to accept that as reality. That's the same thing with audio engineers now. When you play an acoustic guitar, especially if you plug it in, they make it sound like an electric guitar, like they've never heard an acoustic guitar. It's like, "No, I want a big warm full sound", and they've never heard that and they go, "Well that's not what a guitar sounds like."
Do you, like on your recent tour, do you bring a DI box for your acoustic guitar?
I bring microphones. I don't go DI with the acoustic. I don't give them that option any more. I bring a nice little condenser mic along with me — I use that and it sounds really warm and full. They're going to get it or I won't play! [laughs] That's all there is to it. But you can't trust them with it if you give them a line to a piezo pick-up — they'll use the pick-up over a nice, warm-sounding mic every time.
It's easier.
I guess there's less possibility of feedback, but I don't use monitors on stage, I use in-ear monitors, so there's no feedback potential up there.
Do you like the in-ear monitors for that kind of work?
I love them. I think they're great.
Are there changes to your recording gear coming up?
I am getting stuff from Syntrillium. There's this cool thing called Red Rover, which is a remote unit that you can use with your PC. A USB plug-in. And it gives it a lot of "real tape machine" feel to it, with the stop and the fast forward, and track, you can assign tracks and volume and master and all that stuff.
Do you find yourself using plug-ins very often?
I record it flat. Cool Edit Pro has a lot of features, a lot of equalization, reverb and digital delay — things like that. Although they aren't as good as the rack- mounted ones, they sound okay.
Do you have any rack-mounted gear?
Not anymore. I used to. I don't really feel the need to do that. Most of my stuff, being folk music, doesn't need a lot of effects.
