Michael McGovern, Engineer Extraordinaire
Well, we’re rolling toward completion on Percolator’s LP2, which is named…something. We’ll figure something out.
It’s taken us a while to get to the finish line, but now suddenly we’re crossing many small finish lines, on a near daily basis. On Sunday, we finished mixing the album entirely, getting together with friend, engineer & mixer Michael McGovern in our stuffy, tiny rehearsal space for upwards of 9 hours to nudge vocals just a little this way, and then just a little that way back until it was just so, making sure the drums were as epically huge as we’d imagined them, making sure the bass made asses shake. Mike’s been with us every step of the way as we’ve recorded 25 songs (probably much more than he thought we’d be recording!), helping us figure out how to get the Percolator sound he was attracted to down on a recording more genuinely than we’d been able to before, and he’s really pulled it off.
But now that he’s done recording our album, what will he do next? Drop us a line if you’d like a bona fide recording engineer to record your album for you. Mike’s great at what he does.
Meanwhile, Mike’s got some people to thank, himself. Mike?
Michael McGovern’s Thank You’s for Percolator’s LP2
Because I’m just a lowly recording engineer, I don’t get to say a lot of public “thank yous”.
I just finished recording and mixing the first full-length album of my career, and it’s been a long trudge to get here. Since graduating with a B.A. in sound recording FOUR YEARS AGO (jeez, that’s just hitting me) I’ve had a lot of false starts, time off, and personal dilemmas to contend with. Granted, recording engineers make tons of albums, and because it’s just the job, there aren’t many milestones. But I’m going to be self-indulgent for this one, because it’s my first real achievement in the world of recording music, it’s been a long time coming, and I’m quite proud of it.
It would be unreasonable for me to get a space in the album liner notes for the people I want to thank. But while this is the first time I engineered an album alone from start to finish, there have been a lot of people without whom I could not have done any of this. Like, literally wouldn’t have happened.
Some of you directly contributed to this record specifically, others taught me methods that guided me through it, others taught me how to reason through difficult problems, others lent their time, equipment, expertise, and emotional support. And I inherited/stole equipment from a couple names on here, so thanks for that as well.
So, my heartfelt thanks go out to:
Terry, Joann & MaryAnn McGovern, Brett Bakshis, Jon San Paolo (three cheers for this guy and for JSP-WTF Brewery), Matt Hart, Tony, Russell, Gary, Chris Gazdic, Dan Epstein, Dianne Zahnle, Chris Brickley, Freddy Breitberg, Jack Alexander, Benj Kanters, the entire ’06 EA crew including Steve Albini, Greg Norman, Russ Arbuthnot, Chad Smith, Ben Flint and John Novotny, Kevin Jensen, Dan Gardner, Helios Liu, Corey & Neal (SCI Technologies), Pat Droppleman, Josh Younger, Ken Peiser (RIP) and anyone I’m forgetting who should come forward and demand that I thank them for whatever they contributed to this.
Even though I never got a chance to meet the man, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the inspiration to get off my ass and get a record made in quite the same way without the influence of Iain Burgess (RIP).
MAJOR thanks to Jenn Schiffman, Zeina Samara, Adriana Montiel, & Marissa Milstein for allowing your dudes to spend so much time with me instead of you.
Most of all, thanks to Matt Collander, P.J. Macklin, Phil Bertulfo, and Ben Sachs for letting me record their awesome music, and for being patient while I fully re-learned how to make a rock album. You guys are true friends – thanks for trusting me. The next one will sound even better, I swear.