What'd you work on today 3 october 2005

[Rigsby]

and the hang quite nice.

Those things are awesome, i'm so keen to get one ..but which key? Probably D.

[mjau]

Played with my writing partner for a few hours; ended up jamming on a couple of songs for maybe a half hour each (including maggot brain...hell yes!). I'm finally re-learning how to play bass the way I used to.
Organized my rack a little bit, too.

[JGriffin]

for the record I have nothing against trombones or the intrepid musos who play them. They just happen to be the butt of many a joke.

Today was quite hectic. We had back-to-back VO sessions booked for a batch of spots that on Tuesday looked like it was gonna be one script, by Wednesday was 2, by Thursday was 7 and by this morning was 7--with 3 different tags for each one for a total of 21 spots I'll have to record and edit (mix is to be done next week at the music house, due to the time crunch we of course are under).

The 10-11 am slot was the guy reading the legal tags but the lawyers had revisions, which we waited for until 10:45, so we didn't get done with him until 30 minutes into our 11 am ISDN patch to our "800 number" VO. And of course the client was revising those scripts until the last minute so fresh scripts were getting emailed and faxed while we were recording...that went until 45 minutes into our noon slot for the main announcer (for those of you wondering, I did not do the scheduling for this shindig). Amid all this we're swapping back and forth between the two different writers who also have meetings to be in and out of. Finally get the main AVO into the booth here and the client hears his warmup read and says "that's not the right guy." So we have to run around for 30 minutes trying to trace down the business manager, who is at lunch, and ask her how she got this guy's name to book him, eventually figure out he is in fact the wrong guy but we don't know who the right guy is, and we have to stop the session entirely, and kick this poor guy--who has just been warming up in the booth for half an hour and probably thinks it's 'cause we think he sucks--to the curb and pick it up again on Monday, if we can find the right AVO.

[JGriffin]

Addendum: the "right AVO guy" was finally located at 4:15, living in the far south suburbs. He was called in and took an hour and a half to fight his way through rush hour traffic to get to the studio. Long story short (too late, I know) we ended up recording until 8:30 and editing until 10:30. It's midnight and I'm just starting dinner.


I could sit in an office from 9-5 and always know when lunch and the end of the day were coming, but where's the fun in that?

[Karlos the Jackal]

Hey! I've never replied to this type of topic before, since on the rare day that I do anything at all, it's just my ridiculous little home recording amateur stuff and I feel dumb saying anything.

I didn't do anything on the 3rd, but today (Saturday) I recorded some vocals at my house. It was a little weird -- it was an ex-girlfriend that I haven't actually seen in 7 or 8 years.

(We were a two-piece band, which I've since continued solo [sporadically and erratically] and I've been trying to get some decent recordings of the "old stuff.")

Anyway, the only way she'd be able to come up is if she brought up her eight-year-old son and her husband (who I suspect insisted on coming along to "keep an eye on" me). So he was sitting in the next room (luckily -- I had visions of him standing in the recording-room doorway, hands on hips, disapproving look on his face).

The son played video games and the husband -- I dunno, he didn't interrupt us or anything -- I guess he just sat there on the couch. So it wasn't like he was in the room "offering" "advice" or anything. Still, I don't think it helped the "creative process" knowing that there was a disgruntled spouse in the next room, waiting to leave.

The OTHER thing that I discovered was that the songs tended to be pitched a little too high for her. I don't know if her voice has gone down, or if she's just out of practice, or if she was tentative because of the husband in the next room. I really wish I had recorded a couple of different versions of each song -- one version as it was, and another a couple of steps down. (It'd be pretty easy for most of the songs, being simplistic and mechanical -- sequenced keys, drum machine, autoharp -- pretty easy to reproduce in another key. But there was no time to do that today.)

So...I've been trying to schedule this for over a year, and now...I'm disappointed. I haven't been able to bring myself to listen to the recordings, yet...possibly it went better than I thought. Maybe tomorrow.

--K