It's Good to Be Home | Derek Trucks

Feb 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

HAVING HIS OWN STUDIO HAS CHANGED THE WAY DEREK TRUCKS LOOKS AT RECORDING

Photo: Max Spitzenberger

Arguably one of the top guitarists on the music scene today, Derek Trucks's blues-, jazz-, and world-music-influenced slide and lead playing is melodic, inventive, and incredibly expressive. Trucks, who is not yet 30, was a child prodigy who started gigging at age 11. He has had no shortage of accolades in his career, although he still flies a bit under the radar considering his immense talent. But one thing he hasn't had much of is time off from the road. Between his own band — the Derek Trucks Band (DTB) — the Allman Brothers Band (ABB), and the other artists he's toured with (including Eric Clapton), he's been on the road almost constantly for 16 years.

But while many musicians take a hiatus from touring to hunker down in a studio and create, Trucks's busy performing schedule has made his recording experiences, by necessity, more hurried. He and his band have often been dropped off by their tour bus at the door of a commercial studio in a city on their tour route, with finite time to complete the recording before moving on. Although the results have been excellent, Trucks frequently has had to rush through the production and work really hard to get the project done under intense deadline pressure.

Before the release of his new CD, Already Free (Sony/BMG, 2009; see Fig. 1), his studio projects have included six Derek Trucks Band CDs, an Allman Brothers studio release (Trucks has also played on a number of ABB live albums), and guest spots on albums for artists ranging from Gov't Mule to Béla Fleck to David Sanborn to Phil Lesh. But the combination of having a tight schedule and taking an admittedly purist attitude on some of his previous DTB albums (many of which were essentially live-in-the-studio productions) left Trucks feeling that he wasn't reaching his full potential as a recording artist. “He was never comfortable; he could never settle down as an artist,” says Bob Tis (pronounced Tees), who designed Trucks's studio and is the father of Bobby Tis, who engineered most of Already Free and is Trucks's monitor engineer on the road (see the sidebar “Talking with the Techs”).

FIG. 1: Already Free is the first DTB album to be recorded in Trucks’s studio.

Trucks began to branch out in the studio on his previous CD, Songlines (Sony, 2006), which is the first of his solo projects to contain extensive overdubs. But the situation changed radically with the recording of Already Free, because not only did Trucks produce it himself, but it was also the first CD he recorded in his studio, which is located next to his northern Florida home.

Having a home setup totally changed the recording experience for Trucks. It gave him a chance to be off the road for an extended period. He drives his two young kids to school every morning (Trucks is married to singer Susan Tedeschi), and then settles in for a relaxed day of creative inspiration, including both songwriting and tracking with a revolving cast of his musical friends. Trucks told me that unless there is a compelling reason to record elsewhere, he intends to do all of his future projects in his studio. “He can walk into that building and close the doors, he can write, he can play, he can flip a knob and record it. He captures all his ideas,” says Tis Sr. “I think that comfort level was something that he wanted for a long time.”

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I visited with Trucks before a recent show in New York City, and he talked about his studio, his gear, his new CD, and his attitude and approach to recording.

What made you decide to build your own studio?

I wanted to do a rehearsal room away from the house; I just drew it up on a legal pad originally. And I showed Bobby [Tis] and he said, “Why don't you let me send that to my dad? He's kind of in the studio design business.” And I got back these insane blueprints — the floating slab and the faux walls — and the next thing I knew, we were building a world-class studio.