A relaxed tension." That's how bass player Andy West describes the atmosphere inside the rather large studio at Axis Sound on this chilly January night as the Dregs work on their fifth album of uniquely-styled instrumental music.

Dusk is falling outside, emphasizing the natural grayness of this industrialized section of the northwest Atlanta. The surroundings seem strangely at odds with the soaring violin music emanating from the control room speakers inside the unmarked, dingy-looking building as producer/guitarist Steve Morse coaxes perfection from the flying fingers of fellow band member, Allen Sloan.

The pressure is on, the Dregs know. The band's practically unclassifiable brand of classical-country-jazz-rock music isn't that easy to sell, and they have to try and walk the thin line between commercial demands and artistic standards as they labor eight to 12 hours a day to finish up their second release for Arista Records.

So far, sales have gone up-at least a little-on each succeeding release since the Atlanta-based group made its first album for Capricorn Records in 1977. That LP, Free Fall, was followed by What If a year later and the critically acclaimed Night of the Living Dregs in 1979 before Capricorn folded.

Capricorn never seemed to know quite what to do with the talented group of former University of Miami music students and so it was with great expectations that they put out their first LP for Arista last year, Dregs of the Earth. Its sales were better than the previous three albums, but still left much room for improvement.

Sales aren't everything, but they do make artistic freedom possible. The Dregs recognize that fact of life in the recording industry and it's with that in mind that they entered the studio in mid-December.

Still, the tension at the Dregs sessions is of the understated variety, tempered by the easy laugh of sophomore producer Steve Morse.

Taking a brief break from putting down violin overdubs as a visitor enters the control room, Morse speaks into the mic to Sloan, who stands in the center of a studio cluttered with trunks bearing the insignia of Mother's Finest, another Atlanta group recording at Axis.

"Al, there's somebody here to serve some papers on you."

Sloan looks up toward the control room window, slightly puzzled.

Morse laughs. "They found out we've really been selling gold albums and not reporting the income!"

Time for another take. Sloan's voice comes over the speaker. "What song is this?...Oh yeah." Clad in sweatshirt and jeans, he looks rather the gypsy with his relatively short, dark hair and gold earring.

Up in the booth, the lean, pony-tailed Morse sits next to engineer George Pappas at the console. He nods his head as he listens to a brief playback, his sharp, angular features impassive.

Sloan begins playing again, only to be interrupted almost immediately by Morse, who stops the tape. "You held the F," he says.

"Oh yeah, sorry," Morse replies, beginning again.

Morse stops him again. "Late on the C."

Then again. "That C's sharp."

Sloan continues with the complex, arduous passage, then stops himself, shaking his head at something intruding on his concentration from one of the other previously recorded tracks.

"Is this a sanity test?" he asks. "Can you get that stuff off?"

Morse adjusts a couple of dials on the Neve console. "Just don't add anything," Sloan says. "Suddenly the whole world was invading the space."

"This is an insanity test," Morse answers with a grin, "and we all passed."

And they begin again, stopping often. "Pick it up," Morse commands at one point. Then, "that G is getting flat."

"That is so nutso to play," Sloan says, taking a breather.

"Flat," Morse barks.

"Huh?"

"You're getting flat on those top ones. I mean real flat."

Morse knows, because he has written the passage-as he does all the Dregs' material-and taught it to Sloan by picking it out on his guitar. Sitting in the control room at another point in the session, he shows Sloan another line, while accompanying a partial playback.

"Did you have that little piece when we were learning the song or did you formulate it since then?" Sloan asks, a mixture of admiration and amazement in his voice.

Morse shrugs. "Oh, I just added it on."

The problem passage conquered for the moment, Pappas plays back the results: a typically Dregsian romp across musical barriers called "Divided We Stand."

Sloan nods his head to the violin parts while listening. Morse, slouching on a couch, stares straight ahead, his hands folded across his waist.

Suddenly Sloan laughs as he hears one of Morse's musical tricks for the first time. "Oh, wow, I hadn't noticed that before."

The playback finished, he turns to a visitor. "I can't believe that. You work on all the little bits and you just can't appreciate the totality." He looks up at Morse. "It's worth all the pain, Steve."

A sardonic grin parts Morse's lips. "It is?"

"We joke around a lot when we record," Morse says, "but we're also very tense. We're intent on concentrating."

He's taking a break in a lounge down the hall from the studio while Sloan and Pappas work on a punch-in that he matter-of-factly says "they're never gonna get."

With him in the room is bassist West. Drummer Rod Morgenstein and keyboard player T Lavitz have the night off.

"There's a subtle dynamic mood that pervades all our sessions," the bearded, balding West says. "You know why you're there and that you've got to do it and that natural nervousness can take over and ruin your attempts if you're not careful."

Despite the studio humor, he says, "the people around here say our sessions are more serious than most."

"I think that means no drugs and keeping the breaks to a minimum," Morse adds.

The Dregs can't afford to waste time. The album will take about 30-40 working days to complete. At this point they have about 10 days' work left to do, but that will have to be spread over three weeks because they spend weekends playing gigs to make sure there's food on the table.

Unlike some groups, this band is completely prepared when it enters the studio. "I spend the entire year writing," Morse says, "and we learn pieces constantly. Then there's a mad flurry of rehearsals about a month before we go into the studio."

All of the songs have been learned and the arrangements pretty well worked out before the Dregs begin recording. "I take home a tape every day and do my experimenting with the music there," Morse says.

Of course, not all the creativity takes place outside the studio. "We do a lot of experimenting with sound in the studio," he says, "working with the arrangement of the mics, the selection of amplifiers, the miking techniques on the drums and things like that."

"Sometimes," West says, "we'll add or delete lines in the studio. Or change them around. On one song there was this line where I was going to use a fretless bass. But it didn't sound good, so I changed to playing more of the keyboard line and Steve took over on guitar what I was going to play on bass."

The hardest part-and the part that can't be worked out in advance-is recording the solos, Morse says. "That's because you don't know what you're gonna play. It's off the top of your head."

While all the band members compose music, West says, only Morse's tunes are recorded by the Dregs. "The stuff Steve writes is perfectly suited to the type of playing we do. There's no point in throwing in another song just because someone else wrote it."

That's not to say that every note of every Dregs tune is Morse's. "The solos have to come from the people playing them," he says. "We depend a lot on the uniqueness of the solos. They're like little songs in themselves."

Morse is the unquestioned musical leader. "Steve is a good friend," West says, "and we all deal with each other on an equal basis. But when it comes to production, we all defer to him. It feels good; it's real comfortable."

But, Morse says, "a lot of the time somebody will have an idea or concept in mind and we try to work together. If someone is dissatisfied, we go out of our way to get it right.

"The bottom line is that everyone has got to be happy with what they do, 'cause this is what we do for a living, this and gigs."

This is the second Dregs LP Morse has produced, Dregs of the Earth a year ago having been the first. That initial production assignment came about, he says, because a "combination of circumstances, logistics and also a desire to do it, although not an overwhelming desire."

The first LP was produced in Macon by Stewart Levine and the next two were done in Los Angeles with Ken Scott at the controls. Still, Morse says, "on every album we've done I've been there every day and tried to do a lot of the things we do now. The main difference is, I didn't have any control then. We didn't control the budget, the selection of tunes or the schedule."

Despite that, Morse says the band considers the time they worked under other producers well-spent and he praises their former producers, especially Scott.

"Stewart Levine taught us a lot of things, mainly using the energy of the moment and getting off on the excitement of the music. Working with Ken Scott was the most valuable time we spent. By osmosis you pick up a kind of critical sense of what will or won't work and that's real helpful."

"Steve," West adds, "is a lot like Ken in his approach to recording."

The band chose to work in Atlanta because "we're all here," Morse says, and Axis Sound was chosen out of three Atlanta studios the band considered for the Dregs of the Earth LP because "of the equipment, the computerized Neve console and the Studer A-80 tape machines."

"We've been indoctrinated by Ken to believe Studer is the best," West adds.

Another factor, Morse says, "was the fact that the studio management put us at ease and in no way felt uncomfortable about letting me run the machine." The band was so pleased with the results the first time, they felt they ought to return to Axis.

The recording sessions began, Morse says, by bringing the entire band into the studio at once. "We were going for the drum tracks, so we put them in the other room. Everyone played "live" just like at a gig to give the drummer the impression we were playing and it helps when we're putting down the other parts one-by-one to have a reference we can go back to."

Morse also utilizes a constant reference tone on one of the 24 tracks "and a strobe tuner is always on in the studio. At any given moment we can tune an instrument or just check the accuracy of the machine at that time. It's a necessity for us." On the other hand, he says, "we only used a click track on one tune because our music has too many tempo changes and is too complex."

What role does Pappas, the chief engineer and studio manager at Axis Sound, play in the process? "George knows the studio inside and out," Morse says. "He knows what works and what can be done. As far as miking sounds, he's a lot more experienced at that than me. He can right off the bat come up with a mic placement that will work. That's important because we don't have a lot of luck using a lot of EQ."

As far as Morse is concerned, though, "one of the best things George does is not interfere at all. He gets the best sound he can, works with it a few minutes and then just waits. He never says anything about the music arrangements, which is perfect by me."

"We don't do anything without thinking about it," West adds. "We've thought about every aspect of every note we put down and don't need anyone telling Steve about it."

"I just get the sounds Steve wants," Pappas agrees. "Steve can hear a lot of things I can't hear as far as tuning, etc. He's one of the most incredible musicians I've ever worked with."

Pappas, who also engineered the Dregs' last LP, says the main technical ingredient in the group's session work is the Necam computerized automation system. That, he says, is why he came to Axis in 1978 (when it was changed over from LeFevre Sound, run by the gospel music family of the same name) after working as a freelance engineer in Los Angeles.

With the drums, Morse says, "we've worked out all the suggestions beforehand, but Rod is a very natural musician. You can just about let him go and he'll always play something good." It's a matter of "personal preference" in selecting the tracks to use.

Pappas' mic setup includes "two Shure 57s on the snare, Sennheiser 421s on the toms, AKG D-12s on the kick drums and a Neumann U-87 as the overhead. Usually I pick up enough cymbal and highhat without miking them, but sometimes I use the Studer S-Cam 54."

With West, Morse says, "we've used some of his "live" bass tracks, but a lot of his parts are a lot more complex than any other bass parts you'll find, so to get the right sound we go back and redo parts. He practices beforehand."

Pappas says West uses a wide variety of basses, though he relies a lot on Fender. "I usually go direct, but I do use an amp on him at times and use a lot of coincidence stereo mics."

Keyboards are the next to go down on tape, Morse says, and "we have more keyboard textures, so it takes a little longer. T is new (he joined around two years ago) and possibly because of that, he's very willing to accept suggestions without any complaining. He's the clown of the band, really easygoing and so we get a lot done quickly, especially solo-wise."

"On the keyboards," Pappas says, "mainly I use direct signal but I also pipe him out into the room and remic it because it's such a big room."

Morse admits that producing himself on guitar "is difficult" but he maintains he plays his parts "exactly like I would with a producer. The only thing I miss is someone else to tell me something I haven't thought of. I rely on what I thought would work before I came in, and I try to put it down the best I can.

"I make changes if it's not working. It's a matter of using your ears and flying by the seat of your pants. We spend a lot of time worrying about the sound of the guitars."

Morse mainly uses Fender guitars and Ampeg amps, Pappas says. "Sometimes I use six mics on his guitar rig. Lately I've been using two Sennheiser 441s and a lot of the new PZM microphones. I use the PZMs for room sound on the drums and the acoustic guitars, and also use Studers on the acoustic."

When it comes to the violin, Morse says, "we get good sound right off the bat. The problem is picking the take that's most in tune. Every part will be slightly not in tune technically-that's the nature of the instrument. It requires a lot of decisions per minute about which take is better and the concentration is pretty tiring to your ears and your mind." Pappas mics the violin with an old Neumann U-48 and PZMs.

One problem the Dregs don't have is choosing which tracks to include on the album and which to leave off. They don't record any extra tunes, Morse says.

"We're doing eight cuts for the album and that's all. In the past, when we didn't have control, we recorded some extra. But I don't see any point in putting down something you're not sure is going to work."

"Our stuff is so technically oriented at times," West says, "that to do a song just to see if it would work would be a big waste of time."

"A lot of our long tunes are real symphonic," Morse adds. "Recording a cut you don't use is sort of like building a house to see how it looks on the hill."

It's an involved process, with a lot of punching-in of parts and bouncing of tracks, Morse says. "When we bounce tracks, we mute all the tracks that are not playing at that moment. It's a lot of trouble, but one of the advantages of me producing is that I know every note of the music and I can sit there and do it without having to rehearse it."

The music on the new album continues in much the same vein as past Dregs outings. But, Morse says, "we're arranging at least two of the tunes in such a way as to appeal to a broader audience. We're trying to be more commercial than in the past without changing the music. We're trimming down the time and trimming out spots that come down too much. We're trying to keep the energy and a constant beat in a certain time frame."

Basically, West says, "we're choosing to emphasize the elements of our music that are currently more popular. But you don't want to do it so consciously that you cheapen your music."

"We'd love to have a hit single," Morse says, "but if it doesn't happen, f--- it."

Increasing the commercial aspects of the Dregs' music is not just a matter of money, though, West adds. "Commercial success means more. It means people are listening to your stuff. And communication is what music is all about."

Transcribed by John D. Smith