What Did You Work On Today? 2-05-05

[fremitus]

finished mastering the new monatomic cd. (brooklyn electric jazz fusion) and then took three girls out to dinner. they're all here right now, but for some reason i'm checking this post... IDIOT.

[JohnDavisNYC]

rehearsed with jojo mayer all afternoon for a record we're doing next week. then i ate chinese food, and now i'm listening to bowie.

john

[alarmo]

Upgraded my firestation to mLan2, finally, to use it with my powertbook. Built a frame around the dishwasher that's been hooked up but sitting out in the open in our kitchen for months. Currently running backups of lots of projects from the G4 tower in preparation for finally upgrading it to panther as well.

Today's theme is "finally", apparently. I'm heading out to the Will Johnson+What Made Milwaukee Famous+Shearwater show later.

[Soulfull]

My son and I burnt a large part of our brush pile. We had cut down a lot of bushes around the house to let them grow back in better shapes a month or so ago. We don't have a safe place to burn the whole pile, but we have a fire ring that will hold a good size campfire. So we get it started and break up the brush and feed the fire for a few hours. Is is actually kind of fun but my hands are sore. My normal days don't involve so much rough work with my hands.

[xonlocust]

fixed broken shade in van, then did 12 loads of laundry. cleaned the bathroom, went to target. paid practice space rent, ate tacos. finished framing bathroom and dead room walls upstairs. taking break now before grabbing beer and laying out where electrical and audio outlets will go. maybe out to see a show later tonight.

btw - saw aviator last night, i liked it a lot.

[touched1]

Continued tracking for the new Teledubgnosis record. Added a few new percussion tracks into SX 3 from Reaktor. I keep eyeballing my Sidstation and Waldorf Pulse + thinking I should start working them in. Real instruments sound so much better than virtual. Usually.

Then I hung up a picture in the studio of Sophia Loren eyeballing Jayne Mansfield's breasts. We all need inspiration. There is too much woman in that picture. It barely fits on the wall!!

Oh yeah, pretty much confirmed shipment of my new mid-80's Allen & Heath CMC 32 channel board. I hope that turns out to be a good deal....

[Piotr]

I recorded a guy from Gresham, OR and his son on guitar and vocals, and a little mando - clients of mine from before I knew what I was doing. It was an easy three and a half hours and I made $70.

They get a discount cause they're so cool!

My producer in Vancouver that I have been working for has been calling incessantly the last couple days about new gigs.

[joelpatterson]

Did somebody say "Anatomy of a Recording Session?"

There's an 85-voice choir up in Cambridge, New York. There's probably a profile for the kind of person who does this--people who love to sing, I guess, but love to follow the leader too. Hobbyist singers. I always imagine that in everyone's life, there's a point at which you throw caution to the wind and follow your dreams... or you abandon your dreams and take some kind of sensible course, and your dreams turn into your hobbies.

The director of this group is a very charismatic woman who just won a bout with breast cancer, and the choir had been in limbo for the last year. So for her to recover and return was a triumphant thing in itself, and ontop of that they pulled out all the stops. The orchestra assembled for this production was huge by its normal standards, easily two or three dozen players. Now, classical musicians in the modern world can be an odd bunch too--intense, maybe a little awkward, but there's nothing like someone who can make a violin sing, or a cello cry, or a French horn bray. I would say this is a far cry from anything I would listen to voluntarily, but I also have to say that with the right discipline, a classical orchestra is a potent force-- brimming with fervor, ferocious, slamming.

So that's what I did today, took my rolling rack out for another spin. The piece was Mendelssohn's Elijah, and the lead baritone is a great gregarious guy, a singer whose voice just rolls out, it's amazing how he can fill up a big, reverby hall. His face turns red, he's such a give-em-hell kinda singer. By the second act, everyone, chorus and orchestra were melded into a seamless, organic whole, roaring through this bombastic music. I might never choose this off the shelf--but I do admire the passion, precision and the achievement.

[spideyjack]

Started over from sctrach a new song for my concept album about Richard Nixon. This piece involes a tapeloop which I redid and "flying in" a recording off of my answering machine of 8 haikus about RM. All done without any computers or samplers.

Then I set up a bass amp and a mic so I can start recording all the Bass parts for the album.

Now Im gonna eat some popcorn.

[@?,*???&?]

Finished mixing song #9 of 11 songs. Started work on Song #10. This is the project that started back in September and is finally coming to a close.

Supposed to be mixing to 1/2" analog- which I have still yet to procure- but we are on 3 waiting lists for tape. If it gets down to it, used BASF 911 from TapeTape.

Been listening to demos of the next rap project too. Going to try and reinvent that genre. Should be a real change of pace after a Who-esque/Americana record!

[cgarges]

rehearsed with jojo mayer all afternoon for a record we're doing next week. then i ate chinese food, and now i'm listening to bowie.

That, my friend, is my kind of day!

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[workshed]

We woke up in our hotel room at the Oregon coast and realized we had little time to clean up, load the van and check out. Got the wife and kids out a half hour late and went to breakfast at the pig and pancake where I took at least a year off of my life by ordering the Kielbasa Skillet -- Eggs, cheese, sausage gravy served over onions, green peppers, hash browns and sliced up polska kielbasa. Mmmmm. Heart attack.

On the drive home, some guy in a black Ford pickup ahead of us was swerving all over the road on hwy 26. Passing people across double solid yellow lines, almost getting in accidents -- just general acts of drunkery.

We followed him for like 12 miles because our cell phones had no service. At one point he was parked on the side of the highway and then got back on and was behind us. It was at that point, I gracefully pulled off and called 911 from a payphone. I couldn't stand the thought of this jackass killing or hurting someone else.

About 10 miles later, we came out of the mountain pass and I saw a gaggle of police lights -- good, I thought -- they caught him. As we got closer, I saw a red truck pulled over between the cops. Damn, it's someone else. Then I looked closer. There was the black truck. About 75 feet off the road, on its side, broken windshield, wrapped around a couple trees, the canopy in pieces. It looked like the driver survived and I didn't see any other cars in there, so at least the dumbass only caused himself problems. No idea if he went off the road on his own, or if the police were chasing him (there were at least 4 cop cars there). At any rate, I saw the guy standing out there with the cops and he looked like he was probably pretty damn drunk (not to mention messed up from rolling his truck off the highway).

Got home and picked up the dog from the kennel, and was bummed to find out that I missed delivery on the gear I bought from Frank on these boards. Bought some jumper cables so I could start our car with the dead battery. Got it started and took my son with me to charge up the battery and pick up some Thai food for dinner. We bought a couple X-Box games while we waited for dinner, then went home. Caught up on nearly three days of e-mail and Tape Op Ribbon Mic madness (STOP THE INSANITY!), and now am watching DeLovely with the wife and bored to tears by this movie.

[capnreverb]

Recorded a friends math rock band at a bar tonight. Rode nt1 on the guitar amp, peavey 520i on the bass amp. a pair of studio projects c4's as overheads with an at3025 in the sweet spot. Listened back a bit to it when I got back, drums kind of thin, but i don't know what to think. My ears are ringing, and I have always found it best to give a day or two away break from this kind of thing before i really mix it down and decide if i did a good job or not. If I had felt more comfortable with the bar, i would have set up some of my LDC's in the back to get/give a room sound to the mix. That would have been cool and usefull for the learning curve.

[Mr PC]

Got spare tire for truck, went to cool record store, screwed off, did some comping for recordings done by band mates, played organ on a song on my band's someday-to-be-released album which has been in the works for a long long time---

PC

[JGriffin]

Today: more loooong days moving the agency/studio. 9am-11pm all this week, and today I worked until about 6. All of us are completely worn out, and nowhere near done. We should be able to have limited services up by time the place opens on Tuesday (all the non-studio/non-IT folk had Friday and Monday off), but as it sits my audio room won't be done for at least another 3 weeks. We have about half the dubbing rack up, and neither of the AVID rooms have been touched. And our workstations room (Final Cut, cleaner, audio dubbing) never had electricity run to it, 'cause somebody took the power off the drawings. Dunno why. I could go on and on but even I'm starting to get bored bitching about it.

Took off early from all that as there was honestly no more I could do until other stuff happened...like electricity in the workstations room, y'know, and went out to see some of the kids from "Alice" do "Guys and Dolls." They did a fine job, although I really don't like that show. After dinner I spoke to the director a bunch about the new referendum that's coming up for a vote, which if it doesn't pass will mean the theatre, music and all organized sports (basically, all extracurriculars) will have to be eliminated at their high school. Yick.

Tomorrow, either I will compose music for a dance piece, or record more songs with my brother. We'll see.