Time flies when you are having fun

Wow, its been almost 6 months since I last sat down and added to my blog. As usual, I have been swamped with work and other projects and I haven’t taken the time to sit down and write something up. Here is a quick overview of what we have been working on.

Since the Terry Barnes project Chris and I have had a few acts come through the studio. One of the sessions was with another single musician who also plays guitar and sings. I was out of town during that time so Chris ran the session. Over all it turned out well, pretty simple and to the point.

We have started a few of our tracks in the time, playing around with some ideas, working out the kinks, building templates, organizing, etc. In the last 6 months my knowledge of Digital Performer (DP) has increased dramatically. I feel comfortable routing tracks to and from the D8b, editing waveforms, splitting audio, managing mono and stereo tracks, etc.

Chris knocked out the patch panel and it is labeled correctly. That was a huge improvement in our work flow. We realized, or I should say Chris did, that the original patch panel layout was not structured or normalized correctly (check def#3 for normalization). He redid a lot of the order and it is looking really sharp.

While we where recording my vocal track for one of our songs the Neumann U87 burned out on us and we had to send it off to the shop. Its amazing what a cheap part to replace costs for a not cheap mic. It’s the labor that kills you.

We have done a ton of drum recordings and picked up a Shure SM81 for our mic cabinet and it was a great addition for high hats. During one of our first drum recording sessions we found out that we had some patch bay problems in the live room. We ended up spending a day fixing that, but now the panel works perfectly.

One of our bigger projects was working with Matt Wobensmith’s A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. records on the new Deadlee album. We helped Matt (who runs the label and is also the producer for the album) finalize a few mixes and do some pre-mastering. The interesting thing about Deadlee is that he is a part of a new (well new to us at lease) gay hardcore rap movement on the west coast. He is based in LA and is getting some interesting press.

Overall, the Deadlee project was a lot of fun, and it was really good to get Matt into the studio for some fast and furious mix sessions. When I have more time I may sit down and write up about some of our experiences. If you get a chance check out the links… be warned, when I said hardcore gay rap, I mean it is hardcore.

The last thing Chris and I worked on was a mash up of David Bowie’s works for the competition that has been getting a ton of publicity. We didn’t get into the weekly runoff, but neither of us are upset. We decided to go with a really out of leftfield approach and I think that it was too out there for the judges to even consider. I think it was an interesting interpretation, but looking back we both realize that we should have approached it differently.

We have some new ideas in the works and have some other works in progress. Hopefully, I will be able to post a little more often…