(dc -> chicago -> LA) the gods must be crazy about the south pacific

on live earth day, i rode two big gasguzzling jets from dc to la, with a diminishing connection time in chicago as my first leg was delayed and delayed. that's ok. it gave me a reason to sprint through the chicago airport, which i've been dying to do for quite some time.

prior to taking off, i did what was possibly my fastest mix of a record in (my) history. my friend hillary, the country music songwriter, had traveled to tahiti last year and had made some ...well... let's call them "rustic"...recordings of local tatitian baha'is singing prayers and hidden words. his goal was to bring the recordings back, re-record the guitars and ukuleles, and return to tahiti with a cd that could be duplicated and spread from island to island so they all know the same songs. he asked me to do the mixes. i'm not sure i ever actually officially agreed, but suddenly 2 weeks ago he filled me in that he's going back july 15, and could we get it done before then? ack

he did some web research and found a professional traveling ukulele player in baltimore who was willing to learn the songs and come record. we scheduled the session for friday (this past friday). and then, one week before the session (a week ago friday), i got my iphone. i haven't written yet about the chaos that caused in my studio, but the short version is that iphone killed my studio main drive and i spent a week trying to recover it, with no luck.

on thursday night i wrote to hillary and told him that my studio was currently unfunctioning, and that i'd do my best to get something working so we could at least track the ukulele, but i didn't think i was going to be able to mix, since it would mean reinstalling all my plugins from scratch and reauthorizing everything and reconfiguring all the hardware, etc etc. in the past, this has been weeks of work.

friday came and i had to go to work (of course). i worked as long as i could and then rushed home at 3pm. the session was to be at 8. somehow, magically, in 5 hours, i rebuilt my studio system (from scratch), downloading and installing the operating system 4 times, downloading and installing the recording software, plugins, and everything else. also in those 5 hours i converted the bathroom closet into a recording booth (installing acoustic foam, etc), cleaned the bathroom, picked up the studio, washed the dishes, and set up the microphones. i was like a machine and suddenly all my machines started working. with no additional work, my SCSI audio drive that had all the tahiti audio on it started talking to my computer. the recording hardware just worked. seriously, it was spooky.

the ukulele player, victoria vox, was delightful and the session was fun. we ended around 11, and hillary planned to be back the next day (yesterday) for some additional guitar work. i told him i dind't think we'd be able to get everything done if we waited till saturday, so we turned everything back on and laid down the guitars.

yesterday morning i went back over the studio, immediately found my waves plugin disks, installed them, and they worked first try. by the time hillary showed up (with coffee), the system was up and running - just protools and waves, but that's enough to mix tahitian music. i then got into a super intense zone of mixing, flying through each song, making huge improvements (doing things like tuning entire ukulele tracks and guitar tracks down 44 cents - oof!) where i could.

i edited and mixed all the songs - scarcely more than rough mixes, but still, i think they will be suitable for their purpose and intended (noncritical) audience) - in about 5 hours. for me, this is a record. there are some mix engineers that can blow through a record like that - like clockwork - especially pop music - but this wasn't your standard pop music, and i usually take my time. not this time. i was on a mission. there would have been no time to work on it when i return from this trip, and i knew it was now or never. so i focused. hillary kept saying, 'how can you hear that?' or 'whoa, how'd you do that?' and kept repeating 'you're a surgeon. you're a surgeon.'

in the end, we achieved hillary's goal of, "just make it sound better." the disk was burning as he drove me to the airport.

now that my system is up and running again, if the gods continue to favor me, i will with any luck be able to finish my film scoring homework that disappeared with the disk wipe.

and now i write you from los angeles (again), as i prepare to shower and begin approximately 14 hours of meetings about mars and the search for life in the universe. (with tahitian prayers stuck in my head)