Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate a Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin Read Free Book Online Page A

rhythm. The funny thing is, Next is still one of Ed’s favorite Bubs albums. “It has character that the other albums don’t,” he says. But when the Bubs checked into Long View in 2003 to record what would become Code Red— the album some say ruined collegiate a cappella—they had a very specific goal in mind: to record a disc so perfect, so produced, that the a cappella tracks were nearly indistinguishable from the original tunes.
    Bill Hare, a legendary a cappella producer based in the Bay Area (who works with groups as far away as Sweden) likes to say that a cappella has, of late, diverged into two separate and distinct arts. “Recording an album is an expression of what’s in your head,” he says. “Singing live is a demonstration of your real skill.” Both are viable. “I’ve never been a believer that a group should sound live the way they do on the recording,” he says. “If that were the case, we wouldn’t have had everything from the Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s on up.” It’s an apt comparison, believe it or not. Like Sgt. Pepper’s, Code Red was a tour de force of production.
    The Bubs ended up reverse-engineering a lot of Code Red . On Bush’s “Machine Head,” the Bubs wanted to match the distortion of Gavin Rossdale’s guitar on the original, so Bill Hare brought out an actual electric guitar. He played the guitar through different Pro Tools amp simulators on his computer until he found the one Bush and Gavin Rossdale used to get that distortion. Then Bill unplugged the electric guitar and strummed. Without the amplifier, the strings sounded like plink plink plink . The Bubs would sing “Machine Head” one way onstage, but in the studio Bill asked them to emulate that tinny plink plink plink with their voices. Bill Hare ran the track through the selfsame amplifier Bush had used. And bam. “The Bubs sounded exactly like the original,” Bill says.
    Code Red was released in April 2004 and it received enviable notices. Dave Trendler reviewed the album for rarb.org , the a cappella equivalent of the tastemaking Web site pitchforkmedia.com , writing: “Who are these superhumans? Whether by machine, superhero, or mortal man, the Beelzebubs have blended the simple human voice with excellent studio work to create an unconventional album.”
    Still, the Bubs did receive hate mail. Some called the album computerized. “People said it was overproduced,” Ed Boyer says. Code Red opened with the Styx song “Mr. Roboto.” Here one might point out the inherent irony of the song’s lyrics: The problem’s plain to see // Too much technology // Machines to save our lives // Machines dehumanize. (Perhaps anticipating these complaints, the Bubs included a statement in the album’s liner notes, saying, “Every sound on this recording was created solely by our fifteen mouths,” much as the Mills Brothers had done in 1931 for their record Swing It, Sister .) It wasn’t just the public that questioned the merits of Code Red . Some of those complaints came from the Bub alums themselves. “Perfection is an aesthetic and an accomplishment,” says Bill Allen, Bubs class of ’83. “But I prefer spontaneity .”
    The thing is, Bill Allen might be the one to blame for all of this. In 1985, he was working as an engineer at A & R Recording Studios in Manhattan, when the Bubs came to record Clue . Bill Allen ran those sessions and he believes he’s responsible for the first-ever studio effect on a Bubs record. It was the intro to “Grazin’ in the Grass,” and Bill recorded the Bubs saying the word pow several times. “I had them linger on pow ,” he says. Powwwwwww. Bill took a pencil and scrubbed a mark on the quarter-inch tape, which he laid on the splicing block, and cut with a razor. When he flipped the tape and played it backward, the powwwwww became wwwwwwwwooopp . “That’s how we got the big crescendo that starts that track,” Bill says. Still, www-wopppp was a far cry from an octavized