It was a loooong day, 12 hours or so. We were going to start the downbeat at noon, but didn’t really get started till quite a while later. There were still tweaks to do on the levels as expected, but the drummer wasn’t tuned. He was going to get there early and be ready by noon but he wasn’t. That increased the stress level of his band mates because they have a set budget and amount of time and they can’t go over it.
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.