SHADE GROAN
This morning, we decided to get coffee at a different place than our usual stops. We worked in the studio til 5 this morning. I say we but...I was editing audio and the artist was, er, resting his voice on the studio couch. I finished editing at about 4.30 and then I backed up my files, which takes about 20 minutes. OK, so I could have been done at 4.50 but I bought a couple of microphones on EBay. EV 664's if you are interested. We've been using one here at the studio, which belonged to the proprietor's grandfather, granddad was a country picker and singer of some note and this was his live mic. I liked the sound of the thing--not super hi-fi, but very aggressive in the high mids, extremely directional (it was designed to be an announcer's mic: to accentuate the human voice's urgent frequencies and to work in environments with lots of background noise). We've used it on drums, guitars, and it did an amazing job as one of three mics I put on the Leslie cabinet (I used my Pacific Pro Audio PPA-2ube mics on the low end, and put the EV on the top, and it was very effective).
Back to the coffee. We went to a palace we hadn’t tried before, called Double Shot Coffee Co., on South Boston Ave. in downtown Tulsa. We had a look around—they claim to be the most dedicated roasters in town. Ok. Concrete and metal décor. Could easily pass for a place in Seattle. So far so good. Not much to eat. A couple of slices of banana bread (take a pass on that). So, I approach the barista, a guy in his late thirties. Perhaps he was the proprietor. It’s Sunday morning, he’s unshaven, prob. been working since 7 so I relate this story with all possibly empathies. I asked for a macchiato, my coffee beverage of choice. I understood his mumbled reply to be “I don’t know how to those” –which is the usual response I get in the states when ordering a macchiato. For the record, they are just as dumbfounded when I try to order one in Paris, too. Cheerfully I started to explain how to make one, and he cut me off and said “I didn’t say I don’t know how to make one, I said I don’t make those”.
I was so taken aback I didn’t have a comeback. I just spun on my heels and left.
As the day went on I kept thinking about it. It occurred to me that he might have assumed that I was asking for a Starbucks-style ‘macchiato’: a caramel-infused concoction that has little to do with the Italian original it lifted the name from. To Starbucks, words like macchiato are a fancy way to say, ‘candy’. This guy prob. thought we were local yokels, and that no way would someone in Tulsa who was a coffee lover wouldn’t already be a regular, and thus we were idiots who would order one of those blizzard things that Starbucks sells as an espresso beverage. I’d tell us to FOAD, were that the case.
I will go back at some point and try again, just to see what the hell he’s all about.
For the record, Shades of Brown makes an excellent, Italian style, macchiato.
Other than that, I have been way too busy here at the studio to really have more adventures than that. It’s a big deal if Whitney, wife of Benji, my ‘client’, can join us for dinner so we can hear some new jokes. Problem is, she works as a pediatric resident at a hospital, and a lot of the stories she has to tell are not funny. But they are fascinating—but not uplifting. Tragedies.
Hey, my back up is done for the night—it’s 5.30am and I am going to get perhaps 5 hours of sleep before we start recording again.
Love
KS
Tulsa OK
