Sam Albright Analog to Digital: The Evolution of a Recording Studio Velvetone Records

On this episode of Exploring Washington State, we delve into the world of music production and instrument building with our special guest Sam Albright. We explore the process of mastering records and how different formats require specific adjustments to sound their best. 

We explore the process of mastering records and how different formats require specific adjustments to sound their best. Sam shares his experience of having records mastered at John Golden Mastering and how it differed from today’s digital process.

Sam also discuss his passion for building handmade mandolins and the challenges and joys that come with it.

We learn about his involvement with the Japanese girl punk band, Shonen Knife, and his experience recording with Van and Lee Conner of Screaming Trees.

Finally, we hear about his journey in building a recording studio and how the studio transitioned from analog to digital recording technology.

Join us as we take a deep dive into the world of music production and building handmade instruments.

Episode Summary: Mastering Records, Building Instruments, and Creating Good Music

– Mastering Records

– Excitement about test pressings 

– Analog and digital master similarities 

– Adjusting each format with optimization 

– Goal: making the record sound good at any level 

– Mastering techniques of the past differs from the present 

– Building Instruments

– 15 instruments made 

– Techniques of instrument making 

– Availability of high-quality instruments diminishes solo builders 

– Physical toll of instrument-making 

– Handmade instruments do not yield a high income 

– Recording and Playing Live 

– Creative moment with multiple people 

– Find the switch that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up 

– Building a studio to demo other business ventures 

– Van and Lee Conner (Screaming Trees)

– Met Van and Lee Conner through their parents’ video store 

– Project was a group effort with the studio providing time and the band’s parents contributed half the funding 

– Successful, intensive experience 

– Building a Recording Studio 

– Experiencing arson fires 

– New building designed with friend technical knowledge 

– Studio designed for big room to allow for musicians playing together 

– Digital transition over time

The Creative Process: “You’re after that creative moment with multiple people. There’s moments when the hairs on the back of your neck, they stand up and you just go, okay, that’s it right there. That was it. And we’re looking for that switch that you could turn on to make that happen. But there is no switch. It’s a combination of many, many things.”

— Sam Albright

Sam Albright Episode Transcript

You. Hello, friends, and welcome to the Exploring Washington state podcast. My name is Scott Cowan and I’m the host of the show. Each episode, I have a conversation with an interesting guest who is living in or from Washington State. These are casual conversations with real and interesting people. I think you’re going to like the show. So let’s jump right in with today’s guest.

I’m sitting down today with Sam Albright. Sam lives in Ellensburg. As those of you who listen to the show at all know that I went to college in Ellensburg. I have a soft spot for that. That town I found out about Sam. Well, I kind of knew who you were in the sense that the studio I mean, I knew of the studio, but we’ll come to that. But anyway, a mutual friend of ours posted on an article from the Ellensburg Record that you have leased out the studio and you’ve decided to concentrate fully on your creativity. How’s that? Maybe that’s the spin.

Sam Albright [00:01:02]:

Well, that’s a good story.

Scott Cowan [00:01:04]:

Yes, good story. We’ll stick with it for you. Okay. But anyway, and I’m on your website, and I’m just going to say three words, and then from there I’m going to ask you to elaborate and I quote, a prolific artist. So where do you want to go with that? You’re prolific. What do you want to talk about?

Sam Albright [00:01:21]:

Sam? How’s that sort of scott yeah, that kind of leaves it wide open. Well, the people who know me know that. Yeah, I mean, some people have a hard time embracing the term artist or calling themselves that, but I don’t have any problem with that. It’s a blessing and a curse. I mean, I’m up in the morning and I’m sitting at the kitchen table painting. That’s what I’m doing right now. And it’s really great. That’s what I’m kind of focusing on now. But I can feel the music, the sound thing. Coming back as COVID hit, I kind of went visual and I really didn’t play much music, and my old hands were getting worn out and I was doing some building projects that weren’t good on my bones and playing was just harder and harder. So I wasn’t able to kind of play at the level that I wanted to play at.

Scott Cowan [00:02:31]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:02:33]:

But once I wasn’t building this big dodecagon straw bale building that I’ve been working on for the last couple of years, the music, I feel like, is starting to come back. I am prolific. That’s kind of what I do. I make things and I’m interested in things. And I love paint, and it’s very similar to sound to me. I mean, paint and sound, they just go together. We use terms that are the same. I mean, we use composition, we use values. We make music with different instruments, like different colors in a painting. So it all just kind of flows together for me. But I definitely go through different cycles of visual work and then back to making music.

Scott Cowan [00:03:32]:

So what little background I know about you and for your clarity, I don’t do a lot of research on my guests because I genuinely like to be surprised when they sam something. What I do know is you graduated from Central, you went back to the Seattle area, you had a gallery, you came back to Ellensburg. So, first off, the draw of Ellensburg is real.

Sam Albright [00:03:55]:

I don’t know, it’s a vortex. It’s the ellensburg vortex. Once you’re kind of in it, then it’s going to suck you right back.

Scott Cowan [00:04:04]:

You just can’t escape. We’ll come back to the gallery in Seattle. Let me ask you this question. Why did you open a recording studio?

Sam Albright [00:04:21]:

Well, it was after our studio space that had a gallery in Seattle, blanchard Street Studios. And it was maybe 1979, and I had driven across the country with my wife and we were looking for graduate schools and we just went, well, Larry Reid just started hired Hand Gallery down in Pioneer Square. Why don’t we just move over to Seattle and just live in the city and make art and just live in a loft and do the whole thing? Okay? And we found this place on first in Blanchard. It’s still there, not an artist space. Of course, Bell Town has changed a little bit since 1970, 919, 80. Just a little, just a little bit. We had 4000 sqft for $300 a month, I think is what it was. And we had seven different artists that we were, you know, that vacant lot that’s kind of up from the Bell Town Cafe and on Blantard Street there’s a vacant lot and then there’s a brick, one of the big old brick hotel buildings.

Scott Cowan [00:05:39]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:05:41]:

We used to be able to look out of our loft window right there down to the Bell Town Tavern, I think is what it was called.

Scott Cowan [00:05:50]:

Okay?

Sam Albright [00:05:51]:

And happy hour started there at 06:00 A.m., I think, 07:00 A.m., maybe. And we had a big dance space. We refinished the floor, we had mirrors on the end. We had seven different artists that rented space there. And we all, I think we were the only ones that really officially lived there. But we were young and hey, we had some great parties and we had a little gallery space on the street. That window is still there, the corner where our apartment was. We had a little loft up there looking out down to First Avenue. That’s where Trouble in Mind was shot. The movie with, I think, Keith Caradine and just some great Seattle shots in the mid 80s probably is when they shot it after we had closed up shop. And Seattle was dark and rainy. It was like the quintessential Seattle. It was a scene back then. So there was a lot of us young artists and musicians that would go listen to Red Dress and Kid Africa. It was a great time I got.

Scott Cowan [00:07:15]:

To interrupt you, because the thing is.

Sam Albright [00:07:17]:

That.

Scott Cowan [00:07:19]:

To many people, sales music scene was grunge. Like everyone’s, like, talking about way later.

Sam Albright [00:07:26]:

I know.

Scott Cowan [00:07:27]:

Like the late seventy s and the early 80s. There were some amazing bands in Seattle and they all seemed to hart made it, they made it out. But like, the heats, for example.

Sam Albright [00:07:48]:

Do you remember the Heats or the range hoods?

Scott Cowan [00:07:50]:

Well, that’s the Sam guy. Steve Pearson.

Sam Albright [00:07:53]:

Is that Steve Pearson? Yeah. And he used to come over to Ellensburg and play with Frank Johnson. Frank Johnson? Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:08:00]:

In British racing. Green.

Sam Albright [00:08:01]:

British racing green. I used to play with Frank and I recorded all kinds of stuff with Frank. I played in a couple of bands with Frank.

Scott Cowan [00:08:08]:

So you know John Newton then as well?

Sam Albright [00:08:11]:

I don’t really know. Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:08:13]:

John lives in Cleom and he’s he was he was the drummer in Steve’s in that band. All right, so so the point is though, is that the Seattle music scene in the late seventy s and early 80s was so much fun and it was just a great time. And I’m not taking anything away from the grunge era, just I really liked Seattle’s music in the early to mid.

Sam Albright [00:08:36]:

Eighty s. I did too.

Scott Cowan [00:08:40]:

In fact, I have a framed heats album right over here that’s off my table that needs to go on the wall somewhere. I haven’t hung it up yet anyway. Okay, so I still can’t believe you had 4000 sqft. For that, even.

Sam Albright [00:08:56]:

I think they’ve raised the rent by $50 towards the end of the two or three years that we ran it there. And it was super cheap. I didn’t have to work too much. It was a very different time.

Scott Cowan [00:09:15]:

Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. I had probably 1986, I had a house on the water over in West Seattle by the font La Roy Ferry, right, yeah. And my friends thought I was crazy for paying $600 a month, but I was on the water. It was great. It was expensive for mid eighty s dollars.

Sam Albright [00:09:40]:

And you probably had to clean out the mildew a little bit in the closet. No, not too bad.

Scott Cowan [00:09:47]:

I probably should have.

Sam Albright [00:09:49]:

Maybe.

Scott Cowan [00:09:49]:

I probably should have. So you guys did this kind of I’ll call it a co op artist cooperative ed.

Sam Albright [00:09:57]:

Blanchard street. Yeah, it was a co op. Everybody chipped in the rent and we paid the rent and we had, let’s see, I think we had six or seven arson fires in the building there while we were while we were there. I remember one time waking up and the whole place was filled with smoke and we all ran outside and they put it out and it was fine. We had the bums sleeping in our back door right along the alleyway off of Blanchard, right there. We’d knock on the door, say, hey, stop rattling around in your box. There wasn’t that much street life not like it is now, but that brings up moving to the studio. We moved back to Ellensburg after doing Blanchard Street. We moved up to Capitol Hill and Ren and I, my wife Ren and I were going to have our daughter and we went probably living in the loft on Blanchard. And first is probably not the place where we wanted to raise a kid. So, like so many others, you have your family and then you kind of want to be a little more stable. So we moved back to Ellensburg, thought that would be a good place to raise a family. And I found this big old concrete building down by the old train station. And my dad, Alto Albright, made Alto’s easy mat cutting tools and he invented those and that was the family business. I’d go help him put them together, but I really hadn’t thought of doing that as a career. But we found this building, we bought it for a really great price and moved all of the manufacturing over there. And then upstairs on that was a burnout shell with bats flying around. But the floor and the ceiling were or the rafters were there, right? So it was a blank slate. And I had done some recording over the years. I might have had a real to reel way back and done some multi track stuff and thought, well, why don’t we just do this ourselves? We can do this. I come from a creative family. It’s supportive. It’s like if you get an idea, well, what are the tools you need to explore that? And it’s fun in the exploration. It’s like, if you are interested in a guitar, well, get a guitar and start exploring what all the capabilities of that instrument are, or a mandolin or recording or paints or whatever the medium is. If you have the tools and then you can learn, it’s just exciting. So we designed over a year the studio upstairs and a guy who I had recorded with who went to he went to actual recording school. It was one of the early recording schools at one of the state schools, I think, over in Walla Walla, maybe, or Coleman or something. And Peter Carl, and he knew the technicality of it, so he helped me design all the wiring. We had mic inputs all around the room. And you had mentioned heart. Well, we had been in K, smith was in Seattle, and some of the other studios, they were all big and fancy and expensive, and those of us in our mid 20s really couldn’t afford that. And we wanted to be able to record and be in the creative process of doing of recording. So we wanted to make a big room. The style of the 70s were small, isolated spaces where to eliminate leakage between, say, the drum set, the loud guitar amps and the bass and all the different parts. You want to isolate these different things? Well, I wanted to go back to say, the Beatles model or those guys who they’d play together. You had to play together. You wanted to be visually connected, to be audio connected in the same room, so things bleed a little bit. So we built a nice big room and luckily the building was a very odd shape, so it was real easy to make walls that weren’t parallel. We were starting from scratch. The big room, we designed it with different areas that sounded differently and then it was isolated really well from the control room, and it still is, but I’m not going to be using it that way anymore. We opened in 83 and we built it over about a year and a half before then. And it still works great. It’s like the sound lock corridor, the big room, the control room, all work good, all the mic sends are all there. But now it’s a sad part where I’m kind of letting go of that history, but I’m kind of ready. And the technology really has changed. We recorded everything analog at the beginning and then we went through the entire transformation from analog into digital. I mean, we used when when the first Mac came out, the little black and white one, we did some Midi in there and that was like, wow, that was amazing. We could do Midi and we could make a keyboard play. We can move the little notes around and all of a sudden the keyboard is playing and that was amazing. And we said, no, we’ll never be able to do real audio in there. It’s never going to be good enough. And then, oh well, then this one, we had the first versions of all that stuff and then we had ADATs and we had the Sony F one format we used to master too. And some of the first stuff, it was rough, it didn’t sound that good because the resolution wasn’t up to the old analog. Machines just sound great and they still do. But now we’ve got the digital, it sounds just great. There’s no way you could tell the difference.

Scott Cowan [00:17:04]:

And for twelve year old kid or whatever, somebody with really no money garage Band on their Mac.

Sam Albright [00:17:15]:

Are you kidding?

Scott Cowan [00:17:16]:

It’s like you could put together if you’re musically creative, you can put together your idea on a laptop that cost $1,000. I’m not trying to say it’s not.

Sam Albright [00:17:34]:

You could get a used one for a couple of $100, record on GarageBand, get a decent mic with one little interface. Or this mic I’m talking on here, you just plug it in. It’s a USB mic, it works great. Albright, I can record a whole yeah, it’s amazing.

Scott Cowan [00:17:53]:

In the 40 ish years of the digital transformation, just how inexpensive and how powerful and small everything has gotten. I have garage band on my phone.

Sam Albright [00:18:09]:

I do too.

Scott Cowan [00:18:10]:

In theory. In theory, if I was musically competent, I could use this device and put together a demo.

Sam Albright [00:18:23]:

One of my good friends who was a Seattle musician, working musician, neil Brown or Virgil Brown, he played through that whole he’s friends with Pearson and some of those guys and the guys from Red Dress. He does all his demos on a little iPad and sends them around and gets people to add parts, and they sound great. There is limitations with the microphones. I mean, there’s a high end thing that I’m sure Apple or whoever will figure it out and make it even better on the next version. But a good mic, I mean, I’m keeping all my old mics and my preamps. Those key things are you can’t do without a good mic. Although you can get a good mic for a lot less than it looks like. You’re talking on SM seven there. That’s a fairly expensive dynamic mic, but it just sounds good. It’s got a big fat sound for.

Scott Cowan [00:19:33]:

What I’m using it for. It’s probably overkill, but you can find these on sale for $350. So not like the $3,000 microphones that you can see. But I want to interject something. So you mentioned you wanted to make it a big room and kind of go away from what the rooms were like in Seattle, and you referenced the Beatles playing together. Have you ever been to Abbey Road Studios?

Sam Albright [00:20:02]:

I love to go.

Scott Cowan [00:20:04]:

Do you know a Seattle area musician by the name of Jesse Butterworth?

Sam Albright [00:20:08]:

No.

Scott Cowan [00:20:09]:

So Jesse is an interesting guy, and he recorded his first solo album at Abbey Road Studios.

Sam Albright [00:20:19]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:20:20]:

Okay. But I guess Abbey Road kind of fell on some hard times for a while anyway. But I was talking to him. You literally can go in there and go, I’d like to use the piano that John used for blah, blah, blah. Or I’d like to use the microphone that Frank Sinatra sang. You can literally, like from the menu, order these old 50, 60, 70 year old pieces of equipment and use it, and it’s just like and they’re taken care of.

Sam Albright [00:20:55]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:20:55]:

And the old stuff’s still really cool. Yeah.

Sam Albright [00:20:58]:

Anyway, absolutely.

Scott Cowan [00:21:01]:

The question I have so I think I know the answer, because you kind of alluded to it. Your family is creative, your family is supportive. Whose idea was it? And you’re married your wife. I don’t know anything about your wife. So is she a musician? Is your wife musical at all?

Sam Albright [00:21:20]:

She is pretty musical, but she doesn’t play.

Scott Cowan [00:21:24]:

So when you said, I think I want to make a recording studio, how’d that go? How was that conversation?

Sam Albright [00:21:31]:

How was that conversation? Now we’re getting into a long conversation because making an independent recording studio is a big pit that you throw your extra change.

Scott Cowan [00:21:47]:

Is it like a boat? Basically?

Sam Albright [00:21:50]:

It’s a big boat.

Scott Cowan [00:21:51]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:21:51]:

Yeah. And you want to have your boat nice and shiny and put really cool gunnels on your boat meter.

Scott Cowan [00:22:02]:

Yeah.

Sam Albright [00:22:04]:

It’S like fishing or something, I don’t know. But you’re after that creative moment with multiple people. I mean, that’s a difference, say with painting, which is kind of a solo thing, and recording with people or playing live with people. There’s moments when the hairs on the back of your neck, they stand up and you just go, okay, that’s it right there. That was it. And we’re looking for that switch that you could turn on to make that happen. But there is no switch. It’s a combination of many, many things. Building the studio, we used it for all kinds of different things. At the end I was kind of breaking even if I didn’t pay myself anything. But I had a really good solid business that we ran, so we had our day jobs. I mean, I’d go across the country and demonstrate matte cutting and then we had a quilting tool for quilters that would cut fabric really accurately and we’d go we had a booth at the Puala Fair for like 25 years.

Scott Cowan [00:23:31]:

That’s where I saw you.

Sam Albright [00:23:33]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:23:35]:

My mom probably has your equipment.

Sam Albright [00:23:37]:

Seriously? Seriously. There’s people all over the world that have the equipment. The matte cutters work great. We were in the art materials industry for 40 years and would go to New York and Houston and all over the country demonstrating our tools and selling them to Dick Blick and Artisan, just all the stores. And then we’d sell them direct at the shows. But that made us the money. And then I had really good engineers well, just basically two other engineers that would run the sessions, mostly and Steve Fisk, who is still going strong and a really good friend. He came after Peter Carl and Peter has Peter Carl recording, I think, in Brooklyn and he’s really into vintage microphones and does great jazz recordings in New York.

Scott Cowan [00:24:45]:

How did you meet these guys? Were they in Ellensburg or how did you get them to ellensburg is a vortex, I agree. But if you haven’t been exposed to it, it might be a hard sell. So how’d you meet these guys?

Sam Albright [00:24:59]:

Well, Ellensburg, it’s a college town. It’s a farming cowboy horsey and college town. So it’s that mix. And so a lot of us come back because it is that mix and it’s very artistic too. There’s a lot of and at various times in its history it has has had a lot of music come through it too. So you can come here and woodshed and learn your craft and play down at the local place and go so Steve was a student here at the music department at Central Washington University in this was the mid seventy s. And I was in the art department mostly a little bit in the music, but not so much. And we were kind of the college hippies doing dance performances with synthesizers and multiple guitars stacked up on things and this was way before grunge or anything like or punk. This is way before punk. And we did soundtracks for our entourage of dancers. So we were the musicians, and my wife was one of the dancers.

Scott Cowan [00:26:24]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:26:26]:

And then Steve went to Olympia and was part of the scene down there, the Evergreen scene, and learned synthesizer stuff down there and played with all kinds of people. And then when Peter Carl wanted to move back east, he was done with Ellensburg. I don’t think he’s ever been back. He didn’t get into vortex. Okay, but Steve, I called up Steve and I said, hey, I need an engineer. And Steve was finishing up something down there. So Steve came back over to Ellensburg and was my engineer for I don’t know how many years. And we did all kinds of stuff from Pacific Pipe ads and Chevy ads to the Screaming Trees and Moral Crux, and Steve remixed a soundgarden thing there and just all kinds of things.

Scott Cowan [00:27:30]:

How many different acts do you think recorded in the studio over the years?

Sam Albright [00:27:36]:

I can’t even imagine, in fact, because I’m closing up shop, right? I really am. I had to go through and I’m still pulling out all of the multi track tapes, the master tapes, the different formats that we had. I mean, we recorded on SVHS Hi Fi Digital before it turned into blah, blah, blah. And I got the beta masters that were on beta, and I hope I can get the Beta machine to play through the F One format. So there’s a lot of masters on those formats that I hope can play. Where were we going with that one?

Scott Cowan [00:28:19]:

How many?

Sam Albright [00:28:20]:

Okay, well, I stopped at about 50 that I had written down that were bigger projects. I mean, they weren’t all albums or they weren’t all CDs. A lot of them were cassettes at the time. We did cassette duplication.

Scott Cowan [00:28:36]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:28:36]:

We did. Shonen knife. Oh, I forgot to write that one down. You probably don’t know who Shonen Knife is, but they were kind of a Japanese girl punk band from Japan, and we ended up duping their cassettes. I don’t know how that happened, but Calvin Johnson from Olympia, we duped a lot of K cassettes for Calvin. And we’d stack up like, ten cassette decks, and you’d get them all in pause. So you load them all, and then you get the master going, and it’s all just in pause at the right place. And then you get your fingers lined up on those triggers so you can hit about five with each hand. And then you hit them and then the go. And then you watch. So the leader goes by, right? This is analog, baby. The leader goes by, and then you hit the go on the master, and you make sure all the meters are going. And then there you run a side of a cassette, and then once those are done, click, click, you can hear them. And then you turn them over and do the other side.

Scott Cowan [00:29:46]:

Oh my gosh. Yeah. What were you guys using for cassette decks for this project?

Sam Albright [00:29:56]:

Probably the best one we had was A Nakamichi. Then we had Sony’s. Most of them were sony’s, I think.

Scott Cowan [00:30:04]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:30:04]:

They were sony’s. And I’ve still got about five of them left that I’ve I just pulled one out that I’m that’s kind of a nice Sony. And I was cleaning the heads the other day because I’ve got a there’s all these we used to carry around Walkmans, right? And we put ideas on them. So guitar ideas, song ideas. Now it’s all on my phone, right? I’ve got 1000 song ideas on my phone, and I need to go through those and make the next big hit record, right? So I’ve got to go through a box and boxes of cassettes. So I hope they play. But the masters we have to treat a little differently, right? Those over 30, 40 years can I mean, are we getting into the weeds here? Is anybody going to be interested in this?

Scott Cowan [00:31:02]:

You know what, this is my show and I’m interested. So I don’t care because I’ll go.

Sam Albright [00:31:08]:

All the way down the rabbit hole.

Scott Cowan [00:31:10]:

Just keep going.

Sam Albright [00:31:11]:

I’ll reel you in, but keep going. Just reel me in. Because A, you know, I do like to be in enthusiasm, not necessarily in a rush, right?

Scott Cowan [00:31:22]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:31:23]:

So be in enthusiasm. Whatever you’re doing, be in that enthusiastic mode. Anyway, back to, like, master tapes. They are hydroscopic. So there’s the oxide that the recording is done on, and those little oxide particles get magnetized, and that’s where the information for an analog recording is. And you play that back and magically it turns into whatever you put on there. And over time, they collect a little water and absorb, and then they become weaker. The connection for those oxides is not so good anymore.

Scott Cowan [00:32:06]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:32:07]:

And if you run them on your, say, a multi track, you put a two inch multi track or a half inch multi track or inch or whatever on the machine that oxide comes off and deposits right on the heads or on the pinch roller or on the capstones. And the tape just locks up and you got to clean the thing and start from scratch. So we bake the tapes is what we call it, okay. And you’re not really baking them, but you’re dehydrating them. So at the big places in La. And New York, they’d have some scientific dehydrator that would be all fancy. Well, a lot of us on the DIY side of things go down to the local Fred Meyer and get a little dehydrator and you stick the tapes in there, and then you have to see how long it takes to dehydrate them. And then you get your first play off of them, and you’re all set up to transfer it into the computer. So on that first play, I want to make sure it’s nice and clean. Everything’s good.

Scott Cowan [00:33:14]:

Right.

Sam Albright [00:33:15]:

Transfer it, because I might not get another play. If it starts coming off, there goes the song. It’s like the information is now deposited on the heads of the machine. So anyway, it’s kind of an interesting process. I’m new at it.

Scott Cowan [00:33:33]:

Okay. Maybe I need to talk to you offline about this so I can get all my Grateful Dead shows off of tape and on.

Sam Albright [00:33:40]:

There you go.

Scott Cowan [00:33:41]:

All my dead tapes. Oh, my gosh. Okay, so you’re using it like a home dehydration dehydrator?

Sam Albright [00:33:50]:

Yeah. Don’t quote me on that.

Scott Cowan [00:33:52]:

No.

Sam Albright [00:33:53]:

We’re among amongst friends here. Right?

Scott Cowan [00:33:57]:

Here’s where my mind went. You said, well, we bake the tapes. I’m thinking he’s got, like, an Easy Bake Oven and put some underneath a light bulb. I don’t know.

Sam Albright [00:34:03]:

It’s just about like that. Yeah, that’s kind of it. And hopefully they don’t melt, so there’s a specific temperature and you got to leave them for a certain amount of time and all that kind of stuff.

Scott Cowan [00:34:13]:

Yeah. Okay.

Sam Albright [00:34:14]:

And so I’m experimenting with some stuff that I don’t care about, and then as I get everything out of the studio and kind of get it at home or basically out in my studio at home right. I will start officially transferring some of that material. And not everything. I mean, most of this stuff nobody’s going to care about. And if anybody’s out there listening and they think they have any tapes at Velvetone, let me know because I’ll send them to you and you can deal with them.

Scott Cowan [00:34:52]:

Actually, there might be a couple of people you might be getting a call.

Sam Albright [00:34:57]:

And they sound great. I mean, I’ve only done it with a few, and they just sound just like the day we made them. I mean, they are just pristine analog. They’re big and fat, and they just sound really good. They just sound really good.

Scott Cowan [00:35:13]:

So I want to ask you a question. There’s a lot of, like, with 50 plus acts that gone through there, but maybe for the casual listener to this show, the biggest name, and if you disagree with me, please share your opinion. But The Screaming Trees probably are the most well known to the masses.

Sam Albright [00:35:36]:

Yeah, there’s no doubt about that.

Scott Cowan [00:35:43]:

What did you think of them when they showed up and they started because they were young Ellensburg kids, right?

Sam Albright [00:35:49]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:35:51]:

So what was your thoughts when you saw them for the first time?

Sam Albright [00:35:55]:

Well, we knew them through the video store which Van and Lee’s folks ran. And that was when we used to go up and they were our local video store, so we knew them as younger kids in the back room. And it’s like, what are those guys doing? And they ask us, well, can I come? We come down and record a cassette or record some stuff. And we were going, yeah, just like anybody else. And Steve was the engineer. Then, and I can’t remember the exact time frame of when exactly, which we’d have to recreate that, and I’m sure we probably will someday. But it was a long time ago, and they were recording, and Steve and I kind of looked at each other and we were just going, man, these guys are really good. They are good. It’s different, it’s melodic. And then Lee is just going nuts on the guitar, and it’s just like it’s just cool. And then Lannigan starts singing, and it’s just like, wow, that guy’s a good singer. They had done a couple of projects which were cassettes, even if especially when, and I forget exactly which ones happened. But then we went to them and said, can we put out let’s put out a record. Let’s make a record, right? And it was a group project. I mean, it’s their songs, it’s their material. But I put up the studio time. Their folks put up half the money for doing the record. Steve was the engineer the whole time, and they were young and not difficult to deal with, but it was an intense project.

Scott Cowan [00:38:00]:

Okay?

Sam Albright [00:38:02]:

And Picker was on drums and just like, rock and the drums and really good. And he was I don’t know how old Mark was at that time, but he was young. And we got that record done and mastered well, for mastering it, we were going to do the record. I had the master tapes under my arm. And I mean, this is a story I’ve told before, but I flew to La. To get it because you’re making records. It was a little different than mastering now. Mastering now, a lot of us can do it ourselves. Yeah, there’s serious mastering engineers that hands down, they’re probably better than anything I could ever do. But we’ve got the software now that we can get pretty darn close. We can get it really good. We can certainly sequence everything, get all the crossfades at the ends of each songs and get them all evened out and make them nice and loud. I’m sure there’s all kinds of tricks that the other guys know, but at that time, we were making records, so you had to do certain things to get it in the groove. It was sub to mono on the bass below, like 300, 400 means anything to anybody, but the bass was sub to mono. So in that groove of a record, you’ve got a right side, which was a stereo, right, and a stereo left, these two channels of the sides of the groove. And if they’re moving separately, they can bounce that needle right out of there. And so you can’t get the record loud enough without making the bass just move together so the needle is bouncing in that groove up and down symmetrically, and then on the high end. So the real mastering engineers to make records, they had some very specific parts, and they had some really serious cool gear, big old compressors and stuff. So I went to La. To John Golden Mastering on Sunset Boulevard and took the tapes in there. Okay, so you were mentioning, oh, those mics that you can get at Abbey Roads, right? Yeah. Well, I was just thinking of that at John Gold at Golden Mastering, I think is what it was called. It john golden was the mastering engineer. The day before I came in there with this psychedelic rock thing from an eight track in Ellensburg, Washington. He was doing frank Sinatra. He was remixing or remastering Frank Sinatra the day before, and the Monkeys, he was remastering the monkey stuff for somebody. I don’t know. He’s in La. So it’s like, who knows what project? And then we throw on the Screaming Trees tapes right after he’d been working on those, and he mentioned it. He said, wow, this is kind of interesting. I was working on the Monkeys yesterday. Oh, and Frank Sinatra, too, by the way.

Scott Cowan [00:41:13]:

And now I’ve got these young kids.

Sam Albright [00:41:15]:

From where are you from? I was like and I remember him saying, no, this sounds good. And it was just on his big speakers in this mastering suite. It’s just like, yeah, that sounds like it’s supposed that’s what we mixed. It didn’t change. So I was pretty satisfied with, okay, yeah, that’s what we mixed. Those are the decisions we made on the overall sound. He EQed a couple of things. There was a couple of songs that in the mastering process, you even things out because it’s really hard in the mixing process to get everything perfectly consistent. So you might on his first pass of listening to it, he would make a note and go up one DB down tube DBS on this song, that song to get them evened out. Okay. It’s a little easier now, because back then, it was analog. We were running the board with our fingers. We had no automation or anything. We had, like, three guys on a small board. And okay, here comes the second verse. Remember that snaredrum is too loud on the third beat. Get it, turn down the fader. OOH. Oh, I missed it. And then you got to start over again. So it was very much playing. It more than we do now.

Scott Cowan [00:42:41]:

Two questions, and they’re both regarding time. So, first question to record The Screaming Trees, this project, how long did that take?

Sam Albright [00:42:53]:

I can’t even remotely remember because it’d be a matter of days or weeks.

Scott Cowan [00:43:06]:

So they just didn’t go in, play one take and walk out the door?

Sam Albright [00:43:10]:

No.

Scott Cowan [00:43:11]:

Right.

Sam Albright [00:43:13]:

They worked hard. You come in, and then after a few hours, you can only work so long. And different people are different. I mean, some people, they can just work all day. Diligently do 4 hours to go, take a break. Do another 4 hours, take a break, and maybe you get the best thing at the end. Or maybe you get the best thing at the beginning. That’s part of the producer’s job, to kind of know the personalities of the people and keep everybody happy. Make sure you don’t give the bass player any beer before 04:00 or whatever, that you have to deal with everybody and keep it rolling because it’s not a good place to practice. I mean, the studio is not the place to practice. That’s an old saying, but it’s true. Or if you’ve got an unlimited budget, hey, go for it. But most people at the level that we were at, you don’t have an unlimited budget. You’re getting by the hour. And we’re barely paying ourselves by the hour. And if it starts to fall apart, then it’s time to stop.

Scott Cowan [00:44:33]:

So part two of that question then was when you took it down to La. To be mastered, how long did that process take?

Sam Albright [00:44:40]:

Oh, that’s like a couple of hours.

Scott Cowan [00:44:43]:

That fast. Wow.

Sam Albright [00:44:45]:

Yeah, he’s a total pro. He comes in, he goes, listens to it through once both sides makes his notes. Yeah, I was probably there. I don’t know. He just said, go away. Come back in an hour. And I went and had some lunch and came back, and then I hung around while he was burning the lacquer. He’s cutting the lacquer. So he makes his notes on a pass, make sure everything’s fine. And then you pass one side, and that’s 20 minutes or whatever it is, 18 to 22 minutes. And then you do another piece of lacquer, and you do the other side.

Scott Cowan [00:45:32]:

And there you are.

Sam Albright [00:45:34]:

There you are. That’s all you get. And then you send it off to get a test pressing done.

Scott Cowan [00:45:40]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [00:45:41]:

Yeah. And the test pressings were they were always exciting. I mean, we’d be waiting for it, because that’s the first time you really hear it on the record, and it does change the record. Definitely sounds different than your master tape. The master tape sounds kind of what we have now in the digital domain. That’s what a good Master sounds like, is what we have now digitally, I think. I know it’s not just me would think that, but you put on a really good analog Master, and you put it right next to something that you ran through the digital system, and they sound very similar. So you’ve got to then adjust things to whatever the format is like for the maximum volume type. Whether you’re making a Master that you’re going to send to a mastering engineer, your overall levels are going to be different than if you’re sending it to duplicate on a CD or if you’re sending it to SoundCloud or they each have kind of a little different overall level, but you want them to sound good at whatever level. And then the mastering engineer will pull it up or the system, like if it’s on Apple music or something like that. Pandora they all have their own algorithms that do stuff that us peons cannot know. So you just give them your best shot. And the things that I’ve done that they’ve always come up and sounded good when they come through the system. Are we segway gangplace?

Scott Cowan [00:47:51]:

We’re going to shift gears away from the studio for a second, but we’re going to stay in the music genre. So when I talked to you on the phone for the first time, I was on your website and I looked at your mandolins, which you informed me that you’re not making mandolins anymore. I think I know the answer. Because you kind of just said, well, if we’re going to do something, we get excited and we’re going to go get what we need. We’re going to go. What got you into making instruments?

Sam Albright [00:48:25]:

Well, let’s see. I was just looking up some old thing and I think I made my first electric guitar when I was 13. Really? Yeah. And I made a bass back then and I’ve always played with all kinds of different instruments. And the thing that got me into mandolins was I wanted a mandolin. Well, I’ve always played acoustic stuff, but I got very much into just electric walls of sound and feedback and Prague rock kind of level of playing. And that was really interesting because it was exciting and difficult and all of that. And then I just really burned out on electric. It was loud and it’s like the gigs never went the way I wanted them to and I couldn’t play what I wanted and the people weren’t anyway, I just burned out on it and I sold my guitar amp and I just went, I’m forget this electric stuff. I’m going to play acoustic instruments. You can do everything with acoustic guitar. I’ve got a great acoustic guitar. I can write things with it. The whole orchestra is in an acoustic guitar. It’s just an amazing thing. And then I kind of discovered that there was all these other people that all these years had been playing acoustic music. So I discovered like, the folk dance groups and bluegrass, and I had old friends that said tried to get me to listen to David Grisman and all those amazing players back in the day. And I kind of went, no, I’m into electric stuff. And now of course, I go, wow, I was really missing out. I could have been learning that stuff over all those years. But I started listening to things and I was going, man, a mandolin is like really portable. I cowan just throw that sucker right over my shoulder. And so I went on ebay and bought a really horrible mandolin and had to tweak it up a little bit and make it play right. And it was okay. And then I went down to Lark in the morning music camp and hung out with great mandolin players down there. And they all said, hey, you’re pretty good. It’s like, why don’t you come down to mandolin symposium with Mike Marshall and David Grisman and Chris Thieley and all these the best in the whole world will show up. And so I went down there, and I was going, wow, these really nice mandolins are nice. I bet you I could make one of those. Of course, I have to put my foot right in it. And so I started talking to the other builders and getting wood. I mean, I had woods, and I have 50 some years of working with wood. I mean, I have a so I have a degree in sculpture, and I’ve built wood, fine crafted wood things. So I wasn’t afraid of making an instrument. But instruments are kind of like the Holy grail of woodworking in my way of looking at it, because you’re making an instrument that you’re supposed to make music with. It has to do that. It has to make good music, or else it’s not worth anything, right? And it has to look really cool, and it has to feel cool in your hand, right. You’ve got to get the neck just right, and everything has to work. And so I started researching mandolins and then made a few I made, like, three or four and took those down to music symposium or mandolin symposium and got a bunch of feedback from some of the great builders and from Mike Marshall and got some feedback on, well, what do I need to make better? And I could play that instrument next to, say, Mike Marshall’s, 1923, Lloyd Lore. It’s like, wow, that’s like the Holy Grail of great instruments, right? So I started making them and then set up my shop to be really designed around making manned lens. And so for a few years, I didn’t really make that many. I kind of was full bore into it, but I only made, like, 15. Okay. And I never crossed the 20 threshold. And then the next threshold is like 50. Once you get past that and then you get past in the hundreds, then you’re really a builder. But, yeah, my hands started wearing out. And you’re not getting rich anytime soon. Making handmade instruments that you’re making like, $10 an hour. With the amount of time, it’s probably 300 hours into one of those mandolin. Really?

Scott Cowan [00:53:52]:

That long? Is it really 300? I don’t believe you.

Sam Albright [00:53:56]:

No, I did figure that easily 300. But that’s really different than a factory, right? So a factory is all set up. You’ve got multiple people that are doing different things, and even though they are all these instruments, whether you think they’re made they’re handmade, I mean, there are people have to put them together, whether they’re in China or wherever they’re made Ellensburg, they’re Ellensburg. There’s people putting them together. And now you can get amazing instruments for not very much money, which is sad for the solo builders. Anyway, I made some mandolins. I sold most of them. I’ve just got a few left, a couple. I’ve got the one I play all the time. And I’ve got another redwood top one that came from these planks that one of my woodworker friends gave me from Northern California. This beautiful redwood, just perfect grain. And I made two matching instruments from that, and one of them is just my favorite sculpture piece as a piece. So you pick the wood for the back, you pick the woods for the sides and the top, and you put it all together, and hopefully it will make some music. Oh, is that an alarm? We’ve already gone an hour. Oh, my goodness. No, we didn’t even get no, I.

Scott Cowan [00:55:34]:

Don’T know what that was. That’s why it was such a shock look on my face.

Sam Albright [00:55:38]:

What’s that?

Scott Cowan [00:55:38]:

It said theater mode. I’m like theater mode. I have no idea. Sorry.

Sam Albright [00:55:46]:

No, that’s okay.

Scott Cowan [00:55:48]:

Hijack.

Sam Albright [00:55:48]:

That I kind of got back into acoustic music and played mandolins and then loved learning some of that world, and I think I’ll stick with that on coming projects, but adding back in some of the electric sounds that are a lot of fun to play with, too.

Scott Cowan [00:56:13]:

Well, you’ve mentioned you have or you’re in the process of pulling all the equipment out of the studio and kind of cataloging it maybe is the right way. And you’re looking at the tape yeah.

Sam Albright [00:56:27]:

Cataloging the projects.

Scott Cowan [00:56:29]:

So I’m going to make an assumption that you’re not going to keep all that equipment. You’re going to rehome it, if you will, to various people that might find it valuable.

Sam Albright [00:56:39]:

Yeah, it’s about half of it, probably. I mean, some of it I just bring home, and I’m just going to use. I mean, I’m not going to get rid of my mics and well, I got my mic stands. I need some of those to put the mics on. Right, but there is like, the big studio speakers. The JBL 44 weigh about 100 pounds apiece, and they’re 15s with a horn, and they sound awesome. But now my phone’s starting to go off. Yeah. So some of the stuff I’m definitely getting rid of. I just kind of made a decision on a couple of the guitar amps that I had. I don’t need all those guitar amps. Some of the rack gear, a lot of it. The technology really has changed. So I know there’s a lot of people back into the old analog gear, but I will set up what I need and then I’ll just use that.

Scott Cowan [00:57:48]:

I’m scrolling through here. There’s a bunch of names that are in here that are local of local names. People that I know, like Frank Johnson, Mark Pickerell, Gary Williams.

Sam Albright [00:58:05]:

Yeah. Gary was just the most amazing drummer. Here’s a Gary Williams story. Those who don’t know Gary gary was a jazz amazing jazz drummer, but he could do any kind of and one time we had a session that it just wasn’t feeling right, and we really didn’t want a whole kit on there. And Gary is one of those ones who could do like different rhythms with every limb going at the same time. But we needed a high hat part. We just needed just a high hat part and Gary could just laid that down and it made everything absolutely work. It wasn’t like you could turn on a sample or hit a keyboard and make a hihat sound kind of like it was in the right place. No, you had to play with this recording and it wasn’t done to a click. So there was some movement to the speed. But Gary just made it all work and he could do that from the simplest part, just this high hat part, all the way to full on super complex, big kit stuff.

Scott Cowan [00:59:31]:

Yeah, he was phenomenal. Yeah, he was phenomenal. I didn’t know him all that well. Many of my friends that I know better knew him very well. My friends that were into music in the Ellensburg in Seattle scene during the 80s there. But Gary was yeah, he was a talent, an amazing talent. And then I just think it’s see, what I think is so cool about the studio because once again, it’s Ellensburg. And I don’t know what number episode this is going to be, right? It’s going to be somewhere north of 245, but not 250 because our 250th episode is going to be our third year anniversary. So I’ve had 250 conversations, let’s just say that. And I think Ellensburg has been referenced more than any other town in Washington State, for sure.

Sam Albright [01:00:38]:

Isn’t that crazy?

Scott Cowan [01:00:39]:

That’s just crazy because I’ve had conversations, like I said, with Mark Pickerell, nick Zettner, the geology professor there at Central, nicole Klaus, who works for the city of Ellensburg now as their communications director, mike Wansley, because he was my college roommate there at Central and so I’ve had him on most. Ellensburg is just this interesting, even though when we decided to move from the Tacoma area over, we were going to move, I was burned out and my wife and I were debating where to go and I was campaigning hard for Ellensburg and too much wind. That’s why we didn’t go. I didn’t get true, but nobody bothered to tell us that Winachi is really windy, too. I really love living in Winachi, don’t get me wrong, but I kind of feel like, you know what we could have done, ellensburg and I just it’s different.

Sam Albright [01:01:43]:

We haven’t grown the way Winachi has. I mean, Winachi has just exploded. We may be in that phase right now and a lot of us are kind of begrudging it because we’ve always had our little thing.

Scott Cowan [01:01:58]:

1100 houses down off the freeway.

Sam Albright [01:02:02]:

Yeah. And there’s probably another three or four of those things going in and there is a lot more people here. I don’t know.

Scott Cowan [01:02:14]:

Things change. Things change, right? What I’m going to propose we do is that I’d like to talk to you about one more topic on this episode, but if you’re willing, I’d like to have you come back and talk more about your painting and sculpture and art separately. Give it oh, I’d love to do that.

Sam Albright [01:02:29]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [01:02:29]:

Okay.

Sam Albright [01:02:30]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [01:02:30]:

So here’s the last question for today, and it’s it’s Ellensburg music related. What are your memories, if any, of the Ranch yeah.

Sam Albright [01:02:42]:

Muddy Waters sitting up there, just like, playing in the ranch of just I mean, I was young, but the dance floor full of boots stomping and beer spilled and table dancing and it was a wild time at the ranch. Yeah. People partied back then and all kinds of different people. Who was that Jimi Hendrix impersonator that I saw at the ranch? That was crazy.

Scott Cowan [01:03:22]:

Is it Randy Hansen?

Sam Albright [01:03:23]:

Yeah, randy Hansen at the ranch. Junior Cadillac at the ranch.

Scott Cowan [01:03:30]:

Junior Cadillac came through a lot.

Sam Albright [01:03:32]:

Lot. Muddy Waters is just one of those weird ones, though.

Scott Cowan [01:03:40]:

Didn’t Chuck Berry play there?

Sam Albright [01:03:42]:

And that’s what I was just going to say. I think I saw Chuck Berry at the ranch.

Scott Cowan [01:03:47]:

Yeah, that was before my time, but.

Sam Albright [01:03:50]:

That was the later era of Chuck Berry. And it was local musicians who he’d just have probably frank was playing bass. I don’t remember. But it was local guys who he’d just pick up the pickup band and he’d just go, go, and he’d start doing it and everybody just had to be on board.

Scott Cowan [01:04:13]:

I’ve heard some people tell me that had played with him. That’s basically what he’d do. He’d come into town and basically, if you had the right instrument in your hand, he’d grab you and he expected you to know his music.

Sam Albright [01:04:29]:

Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Cowan [01:04:30]:

And if you didn’t, he was not a nice man.

Sam Albright [01:04:33]:

No. It was like you had to be on board and jump on the bus and here we go.

Scott Cowan [01:04:38]:

Yeah. The other thing is, when I was at Central and they were bringing in national acts to entertain college students, I always thought it was interesting that what Central was bringing through in the early 80s for concerts there. Yeah. I don’t have a lot of really fond fond memories of those those shows, because they were yeah, you could always tell. So remember the well, the Holiday Inn down oh, yeah, okay, sure. When I was in college, I worked there as a catering guy and a bellboy and all this stuff. And so I was a waiter that night. And when Huey Lewis and the News were playing at Central, I was their waiter for dinner. And then one night, Sammy Hagar was playing at Central and I was his bellboy and had to carry his bags into his room for him. I don’t have anything kind to say, so I’ll just be quiet about that one. That was not a pleasant experience for me.

Sam Albright [01:05:49]:

Well, Ellensburg was part of the odd route. They’d set up these tours and this was along I 90 and 97 goes north and south, and 90 goes to Boston. And so maybe the next night would be in Spokane or wherever. So Seattle and then Ellensburg was another night, and away you go. Hop on the bus. So we had all kinds of people through here.

Scott Cowan [01:06:17]:

Well, it still does, but it had such a great jazz community there, too, that there was a lot of really talented jazz musicians that would play there.

Sam Albright [01:06:31]:

Through the university. There was always quite a department at the university. And then they built a new big building, but there was a lot of great players.

Scott Cowan [01:06:47]:

I always felt like Ellensburg punched above its weight in the music arena.

Sam Albright [01:06:53]:

I think so, yeah.

Scott Cowan [01:06:56]:

I always thought it was a great talent.

Sam Albright [01:06:59]:

We had so many guitar players that came through here. I don’t know, either stayed here or moved on, most of them. But there was local bands, and then there was like, the Nash Band and Lucky Pierre.

Scott Cowan [01:07:21]:

Oh, my gosh.

Sam Albright [01:07:24]:

And then, like, guys like Orville Johnson, who’s in Seattle teach amazing just player and knowledgeable about all kinds of music genres. He came through for a while and played with oh, I forget, in Seattle. Another friend. But anyway, yeah, Ellensburg is and we’re only like an hour and a half from the airport. We’re not that far from Seattle, so we can run over and we’re back over the pass an hour and a half.

Scott Cowan [01:08:04]:

It’s just like you’re living in Tacoma trying to get to the airport.

Sam Albright [01:08:07]:

Exactly right. Well, I’d love next time if we can hit on the visual side because there’s a lot of history in Washington of that and my family, and definitely some of that history would be a whole different story. That would really be kind of a fun time thing to talk about.

Scott Cowan [01:08:32]:

So I normally have a couple of questions I ask guests. I’m going to save one of them for the second episode because I won’t ask you twice. So we’re going to two things. One, musically related. What? Didn’t I ask you that? I should have.

Sam Albright [01:08:48]:

Yeah. I don’t know. What were my latest projects that completed? Okay. I’ve never been good at promotion. We were into the creative side. We wanted to create, work with people, get that hair standing up on the back of our necks when the magic happens. That’s what we were into. And so a lot of projects that are really good, just most of them got lost in the shuffle. But I did three albums with my local band, Better Day, which they’re poppy, country, bluegrass, acoustic, and they’re just great. They’re full of songs that are just awesome. And then I did a solo album called Space Flower that I want to remaster and just get it up on SoundCloud or something. But I was listening to that the other day and I was going, wow, how did I do that? That is cool. That sounds really good from a musical standpoint. I’d just love to get some of my own stuff out there that just kind of got lost because I was doing other things.

Scott Cowan [01:10:07]:

All right, so where can people find you online? Like, if someone wants to look you up right now, where’s a good place?

Sam Albright [01:10:15]:

My website is Samalbright.com, and it couldn’t be more simple if they know my name, Albright.com, and the email that I use for musical related. Should I put an email on here? Yeah, you can, Sam@samalbright.com. I’m trying to get away from the velvetone thing, so I’m not using that email or that website anymore.

Scott Cowan [01:10:49]:

We’ll put a link to your website on on the show notes for this page.

Sam Albright [01:10:51]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [01:10:51]:

All right, so here’s our last question for today, and then I’m going to spare you. And then next time, we’re going to talk visual arts. You ready? Very.

Sam Albright [01:10:57]:

I’m ready.

Scott Cowan [01:10:59]:

Cake or pie and why?

Sam Albright [01:11:02]:

Oh, that’s just a no brainer. Pie. Pie. Got to have pie for breakfast. That’s one of my songs on one of the Better day albums. Pie for breakfast. Yeah. And my mom made the absolute best apple pie. And my grandmother in Minnesota worked at this cafe, and people would come from county wide. They’d drive all the way to get my grandma’s pie. So I’m saying pie is absolutely the answer.