Prelude and Rant. Opus 1.

A prelude to today’s blog...

Why recording is so frustrating:

1. In a line of 8 or 9 connections from microphone to computer any can go wrong, and if one of them goes wrong it’s frequently impossible to tell which, leading to a very lengthy investigation as you go through every possible permutation of those 8 or 9 things.

2. Sometimes these things go wrong for no particular reason, which aside from making the problem even harder to trace, also happens to the user at the most inconvenient possible time. This is known as Dave’s law.

3. These things that go wrong randomly cannot always be fixed, as there is not always a reason for the fault, leading to the inevitable ‘off and on’ again technique used by all good producers and IT department staff, to be the least helpful, but most effective solution to any given problem.

4. IT department staff know this, and refuse to do anything other than turn everything off and on again, even if there is a quicker, more logical, and more efficient way to solve the problem.

5. Sometimes the problem persists and the computer requires a ‘cool-down’ period of several hours before you can do anything. This also eliminates IT help, because all they do is ‘off-n-on’ everything, and this is already proven to not work

6. Sometimes... you have just forgotten to plug something in properly.

And now, ladies and gentlemen...

The blog.

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Recording is so frustrating.

I had every intention of getting a lot done today and it seems as though the mac and all attached software and hardware were having a right good larf making it as difficult for me as humanly (or computerly) possible. I also ended up wasting several hours of poor old Dean’s time as well as he watched me potter around the studio ranting about how the preamp was called Dave and was not cooperating. I imagine it was a fairly boring time for him, although it would seem he didn’t mind informing twitter of my massive studio fail:

'technology is refusing to cooperate'. Damn right.

I feel so exposed...
But we never did get his vocals recorded.

I was later joined by the erstwhile Messers Baker and Tarbet to record their epic bono line of ‘well tonight thank god it’s them, instead of youuuuuu!!!’ which seemed to be more about volume than pitch or tone, but it’s all in the spirit of fun and it has some amusing giggling on it as the vocal part fades away, but nothing quite like when I accidentally recorded a soundcheck and now have a small MP3 file of Ollie thinking of as many words for boobs as there can possibly be. And chuckling. Marvellous.

Blogger will apparently not let me upload this sound clip either. How thoroughly disappointing. Bad blogger. *Squirts with water*.

Anyway, with that done and the guitars nearly in the bag, the end is truly in sight! By the end of tomorrow I should have finished all the instrumental parts and just have to focus on the beautiful voices of the Jenkinson A Conglomerate and the long dark soulless void of the mixing stage... god help me.

Goodnight world!