Instruments you’ll hear on Spinning World:

Piano | Violin | Viola | Cello | Double Bass | Clarinet | Bassoon | Saxophone | Drums  
(and a teeny bit of synthesizer – can you hear where?)

The recording studio, Sage Arts, is housed in a rustic building perched in the woods above the Stillaguamish River in Washington State. The studio is beyond state-of-the-art, with a selection of the world’s best microphones feeding transformerless preamps and custom-built channel strips. This album was recorded digitally on the Sony 3324 and mixed to the Sony 7030.

Sage Arts Recording Studio

The piano: One of the finest Steinways I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing. A seven-foot Walnut that plays like butter and sounds as smooth. (The studio also has a very fine nine-foot Steinway D, but I prefer the smaller piano). Pianist Roger Nelson plays on most of the classical tracks, while the more jazz-inclined Gunnar Madsen sat in on the, well, jazzier tracks.

Violin: Because the material bridged the classical and jazz fields, three violinists were hired to suit the different genres: Karen Iglitzen, noted classical violinist, Claude Ginsberg, lord of the dance violin, and Jeffrey Sick, master of the electric 6-string and the plain-old-wooden violin. Each has a distinctive style, but you’ll find Karen taking a solo or two, and Jeff plays some surprisingly straight violin in places. Can you tell who plays what?

Bassoon and Saxophone: I desperately wanted to include bassoon on a couple of the waltzes, but hiring an extra player just for two tunes was beyond the budget. Imagine my surprise when the saxophone player said "Hey, man, I play bassoon." And he even owned one! And he wasn’t kidding, he can really play it sweet.

Clarinet: Don’t ask me why, I’ve rarely written for clarinet before, but I wanted these waltzes to have LOTS of clarinet in them. It’s such a mournful tone, but there’s a sly humor in it that keeps it from ever dragging down. And it sounds so good when accompanied by solo strings.

Double Bass: When we’d finished recording the entire record and the musicians had gone home, we found that the bass tones of the piano and the cello were not enough. The music begged to have a bass on it. The recording engineer said he knew a guy who could come in and nail the tracks. After the fact? I was skeptical. But Chuck Deardorf, veteran bass player with Airto and Jovino Santos, turned out to be the man to pull it all together. He rarely needed a second take to lay down the parts, he just knew how to make the music.

Drums: Drums are probably not the first instrument that comes to mind when you think of waltzes. And not every waltz needs drums, but there are some that BEG for it. Jazz waltzes (Tipsy Arabella) for sure, others on Spinning World that straddled genre and style. Noted jazz drummer John Bishop kept things spinning.

Any synthesizers on the record? Well, if you’re really really sharp, you may have been able to hear that the bass on Eye of the Camel and The Old Vienna is indeed a synth bass, played by Gunnar Madsen. It just felt right for those tunes! Otherwise, every instrument you hear is 100% pure acoustic.