If you need cheap gear now is the time. Lots o’ gear out there on ebay right now from lots of desperate former studio owners trying to get some quick cash.

“Hey we recorded in your studio back in 1991.  Do you still have our master tapes?”

Wow.  And I can’t even find my car keys.

“I was thinking I’d leave my Groove Agent drums, but your accents of stuff really increased the vibe, great job! I appreciate your talent.”

I haven’t played the drums since last year. I’d sort of retired from my rock band since my bass player and very good friend moved to Portland. It just hasn’t been worth playing since he left. He’s back this weekend, and I’m playing TWO shows.

My hands will be hamburger and my body clock is in for a shock. I’ve gotten used to going to be early, like 11pm. This weekend it will be back to the 3am bed time.

Studio drums

Just after I confirmed my availability for the 2nd gig this Saturday night, I got an email from a studio who needs me to do drum tracks during the day Saturday. I’m gigging Friday night, studio drums Saturday afternoon, and gigging Saturday night.

I’ll have my closing reflections soon…

Problem

He was to come and sit in on the mix for 30 minutes to do a few tweaks. That 30 minutes ended up being over 4.5 hours. It never ends. Once again I pay in the ass for my big mistake of taking a flat fee. I don’t think I can forgive myself for that huge blunder. I never would have done that back in my full time engineering days.

His assignment was to have his parts recorded and bounced down and ready to submit so we can start mixing the next songs. He supposedly worked for over a month on these tracks. I get a flash drive with his audio files on it which only contains the aliases (shortcuts for windows). He never copied the actual files to the drive, just an icon which points to the files resident on his hard drive.

Naturally he didn’t notice that these audio files, which would take several if not dozens of minutes to copy, copied in a split second. He also didn’t bother to check the drive and see if the files were there. Or did he simply click the alias which opened his internal hard drive and he didn’t know it?

Problem

Ok, so no big deal. Just get the files off his main hard drive which the aliases are referring to…right? Uh, of course not. The problem now is that the files those aliases pointed to are probably in a pawn shop somewhere, as his laptop was stolen. Yes, this guy worked for a whole month on something and didn’t back it up.

I’d laugh at this guy because he put a whole month into something and because of his own stupidity and half-assed way of doing things, he has to work another month. But I’m not laughing because it effects me. This means another fucking month of waiting around for him to get his shit done. Another month of my time. Another month of dealing with this project which should have been done months ago.

I’m tempted to pull the plug and just eject on these unprofessional boneheads.

This summer I took on a project and made some very stupid and negligent choices in doing so. The main one being that I settled on a flat rate. Big mistake. Little did I know that this project would be several months long and that I’d be in the absolute hell of listening to a horrid vocalist who is so sharp he makes Ginsu carving knives look dull. Seriously. This guy sings entire freakin’ songs sharp and he doesn’t even know it. “Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp.” Working with this guy is like biting into rotten lemons all day. Then after spending hours on sharp vocals and doing hundreds (I mean hundreds) of takes per song, I have to go in with a pitch correcting software and fix every goddamn note. What a waste of my time, spending dozens of hours fixing some hack’s vocal tracks rather than spending time with my kids, my woman, golfing or just picking the lint out of my ass.

I can barely look these guys in the eye now for blowing my whole fucking summer and wasting my time. Damn the freakin’ keyboard player is so clueless I can’t begin to write about it. After being told his tracks would be all pre-done and ready to lay down I find out they’re not. Then, rather than doing so on his own, says he’d rather have me there to lay them down. No thought about my time, my gas or whatever. I drew the line there and said now way. It would have taken days and days to do that work he was supposed to have done previously.

That flat rate is looking pretty f’n small now since it has been spread out over months and months and months. Did I mention I had to drive 45 minutes each way for 2 months just to go listen to out of tune vocals? Bonus. Good thing gas hit $4.00/gallon right when I started this project. Perfect timing. Might as well take that flat fee and pour it down the fucking gas tank and dump what’s left into auto maintenance and repairs…

My personal life and other business ventures have suffered severely as a result of doing this gig and I’m just plain irritable as hell.

Bran for breakfast?

Now, thank God, we’re mixing. The problem is that we’re doing it at my personal residence. Now the drummer needs to come in and tell me to make his playing and his kit sound like someone other than his own. This guy is a fiber nut and eats about 1704% of his daily allowance of fiber. So he has to take a shit every 24 seconds. Freakin’ wonderful. I’ve got to go to coscto now and buy 120 rolls of toilet paper just because this bran/shit addict is invading my private space. And I wonder. How is shitting 63 times a day enjoyable?

I’m done dealing with musicians. I really mean it. I used to like engineering but I don’t anymore. It isn’t fun. It is grueling, monotonous, frustrating and insanely infuriating when dealing with amateurs. My ears have started ringing too and that has me worried.

Rule #1 of recording is that it always takes longer than you expect.

Crappy drummer

The drummer is fast as hell. He’s got some definite speed and skills. The reason I say crappy drummer, is that this guy is way into eating about 4075% more fiber per day than the human body is designed to take. Therefore this guy has to go take a shit seemingly between every take. At about $100/hour for this studio those are some expensive logs.

Ear fatigue

I’ve really got to take it easy with the volume. I haven’t done sessions like this for a few years and now that I’m a bit “older” I can’t take the loud levels for 12 straight hours like I used to. I need to have all these guys on headphones and keep the control room levels down. That way they can have it as loud as they want without hurting my ears any more than the decades of recording I’ve done already have.

The protools 7.4 rig started to gag later in the evening as well, leading me to the following post after this, why protools sucks #4, #5 and possibly #6.