“What’s going on?” - December 2014, Several years ago I unearthed an old copy of our “Another Day Goes By” cassette tape (for those of you born after 1990 you will have to Wikipedia “cassette tape”). It had been recorded using a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder and some El-cheapo microphones, which was still some pretty fancy stuff for a home studio owned by three starving young punk musicians. Of course, using a 4-track process was pretty limited and a lot of compromises had to be made during the recording process……to say the least. A short while (year or two) later I discovered that digital technology had brought the capability of a very complex recording studio to the home PC (48KHz-24-bit audio, unlimited tracks, various processing options, yada yada). I couldnt help but think if we were recording our music in this day and age what the possibilities would have been…….. Eventually I dabbled into the digital studio world and learned that old analog source material could be brought into the digital domain and therefore into the digital studio environment. Viola! Now I had new hobby! Two of my favorite things, electronics and music, together at last! It all sounded so easy. If you’re not into technical mumbo jumbo and want to avoid your eyes glazing over, you may want to jump over the next paragraph…… Well, without being too technical, a “normal” cassette tape has four tracks. Two tracks are used for stereo (L/R Channels) when playing side one of the tape, and two tracks are stereo when you flip the tape to side two. A 4-track recorder has a tape head designed to use all four tracks in one direction to allow four mono channels to be recorded played back simultaneously. Although our good old Tascam 4-track machine became history long ago, I still had the 4-track master tapes. So when it came time to attempt a transfer the audio using a regular cassette deck, I found that two of the tracks would import properly, but on the other two the audio would be backwards! Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to flip things around so that eventually the audio is no longer reversed. One downside however is that the timing (or speed) of the flipped tracks can be slightly different than the other two. So, apart from the tracks having different timing, varying tempo, being out of tune, limited to whatever we recorded and bounced down, and not to mention wow/flutter, phasing, and bias issues, things were lookin’ pretty good. If you neglected my advice to skip this paragraph, it’s your own fault. Once the tracks were in the digital domain, I thought that trying to remix of the music would be “fun”. What I found out was, the stuff we recorded in the “old days” was limited as to what you could do with it. Oh yeah, I also found out that I knew nothing about mixing audio. Roger had been the expert when we originally did all of this, but tutoring me from the west coast wasnt really an option. There were (and still are) hundreds of hours of trial and error….emphasis on error. Fast forward a couple of more years…. Once I had decided that some of tracks that we originally recorded couldnt be made to sound much better (as they say…..”you can’t polish a turd!”) I thought “hey, maybe we can re-record some things”. Karl and I devised a way to record some guitars at his place and send them to me, and I found a way to re-record the drums. That meant getting behind the kit and becoming a drummer again. That was hard work too! Some of the arrangements were changed slightly here and there to fix things that “were as they were” when it was originally recorded. Due to logistics and monitoring issues, we used all of the original lead vocals tracks. It’s been a long project, but it is finally coming together. If I knew what I was doing, and I wasnt a perfectionist, and life wasnt so busy, it would probably be done by now. So as I sit here, I have MOST of the songs, MOST of the way done….. of course once they are mixed, then they have to be mastered and I have never done that before either. There are Professional Mastering Engineers that have decades of experience and command six figures to master and album, so how hard can it be anyways? I don’t want this to become a lifetime (or retirement) project so I’m going to push ahead and get ‘er done. Hopefully by spring (of 2015 people!!) or sooner you will all be listening to the songs in your car or on your ear buds. Sorry but I don’t plan on a cassette or 8-track re-issue. If this turns out well (how could it not??) I will be giving “One Happy Zucchini” the same treatment. For those who may be less familiar with our history, “One Happy Zucchini” was our second recording. That was recorded on a 6-Track machine which has better fidelity and will import to digital much better. I also have a process figured out so that I can get things done in a much less ridiculous amount of time. Karl and I are also planning on writing some new songs in 2015. That’s what’s going on. Mike/Spike
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 01:24:14 +0000