I’ve always wanted to be able to juggle. When I was in college, I had a roommate who was an amazing juggler – he did devil sticks and four balls and all sorts of stuff. I could watch him for hours. But I never learned to juggle myself. So a couple of years ago, I decided to try it. I took some books out of the library, and bought some supposedly helpful books on-line, and went out and purchased a set of three leather balls specifically for juggling, and set out to, well, throw these balls spastically around my living room. I am, as far as I can tell, hopeless. I understand the principles, but I’m still in that Helen Keller phase; the lightbulb just hasn’t gone on yet.
This is pretty surprising to me, frankly. My hand-eye coordination is pretty good, and, obviously, I have a decent amount of fine motor control. My jazz bassist brother told me, when I started to teach myself to juggle, that he’d learned to juggle quite well in high school – this I did not know – and that his high school teacher was some sort of juggling genius – you know, seven balls, watermelons, lawn mower blades, that sort of thing. So it’s not a family failure; hell, it’s not even a failure among musicians of my generation. It’s just me.
What brings this little embarrassment to mind is the current state of my upcoming album, I’m Not a Modest Man. It’s all recorded. It’s all mixed. The artwork is finished. It merely needs to be mastered. And the problem is that my engineer is a prodigy. At the tender age of 20, Jason is the head sound man at Harper’s Ferry, has his own sound company, and is halfway through a degree in sound engineering at Berklee. So attracting his attention nowadays is something of a challenge. So – I say, taking out the juggling balls – why not do it myself?
Because I stink at it, that’s why. I don’t have the ears, and I know just enough about it to be dangerous; that is, if it were possible for mastering an album to cause physical harm. A little compression here – that sounds right – a little amplification there – yeah, that should work – throw on a hard limiter – oops, what’s that bizarre thud in the background? Is it my software? My hardware? The nineteen steps I took to get to this point? Anybody’s guess. And that’s when I can hear the bizarre thud – the rest of the time, it’s my wife who says, “Um, what’s that bizarre thud in the background? Did you want that there?” Um, no.
I’ve taken a book out of the library, and I’m probably going to give it another shot, but frankly, this is the sort of thing best left to someone who has some aptitude for it. The digital revolution and the Internet have put all sorts of resources at our disposal, and given us the opportunity to demonstrate that, no, you can’t do something just because someone gave you a tool. Google doesn’t make us librarians; ProTools doesn’t make us recording engineers.
It’s humbling, that’s for sure. This is something I feel like I ought to be able to do; but that’s just an illusion, isn’t it? I can’t play jazz, and I know it; I can’t write classical music, and I know it. So now, I know this. I may still be able to gain some proficiency at this particular task; but I’m never going to be Jason. So if you get my next album, and there’s a bizarre thud in the background, you know who to blame.