Time.

Time is always short.  And its never free.I run around chal­leng­ing peo­ple to look at their lives and rec­og­nize things maybe a bit dif­fer­ently, etc.  So, look­ing at my own life, I have had to face, yet again, the truth that:  judg­ing by hours spent, I am in fact not much more than a Music Editor.  While I fancy myself a Music Creator, Maker, etc., the facts state oth­er­wise.  While I have made some progress in this depart­ment, it is still not enough.  For me, or, any­one else for that mat​ter​.So, I refuse to let the sad­ness of this real­iza­tion slow me down, and in fact intend to charge whole-​​heartedly through my cur­rent work, and fight for a more real-​​time Creative future.I don’t believe I’ve men­tioned this yet, but if you are a per­son involved in Music Business on any level, then I highly insist you sub­scribe to a web­site called HypeBot.  They and a hand­ful of oth­ers like them are sail­ing bravely into the new waters of the unde­fined future of the ‘Music Industry’ (a term which has taken on an even more oxy­moronic mean­ing in the last few years).  It’ll be worth your time, for sure.

6000 Sunset Blvd.

So, yeah, last week was pretty crazy and fun.  Spent 5 very long days/​nights at east­west stu­dios, in stu­dio 2.  The band (who are going to change their name) is a 4-​​piece rock band, with the singer play­ing guitar/​keys.  So I just set up every­thing like I do at Northern; put the drums in the mid­dle, and the gui­tar amps on either side like they were set up for a show.  There was an iso booth for the bass, so that’s where his rig went.We used a combo of everyone’s gear and some rented stuff (mostly drums).  They played the songs down live while we worked ‘em out, and then we recorded them with as many peo­ple play­ing at once as pos­si­ble, to main­tain that feel.  “DownTown” Drew Brown was the positive-​​reinforcement Producer, I pitched in my 2.5 cents as well, and Engineered with help from Mimi.  Drew’s friend Frenchie came by every day and made us some out­stand­ing food, which was amazing.The board we tracked through was a dream:  Class A Neve, with all 1073 mic pres.  The mic col­lec­tion was a dream.  The sound of the per­for­mance room was a dream.   Basically, it was pretty easy to get great sounds.  Two sets of room mics on the drums gave us a small-​​room/​big-​​room option.  They were a pair of Neumann U47’s and M50’s.  Awesome.The vocalist/​guitarist used the Bassman/​Marshall rig pro­vided by yours truly, while the lead gui­tarist used my AC30 and Drew’s Matchless Chieftan.  The bass setup was a combo of their Ampeg SVT rig, and my lit­tle Fender Pro Jr. through the Silver “White Sands” cab that has a 15″ speaker in it.  Drums were per­formed by some guy they called “Nards”, who used to play in some band that screams and makes noise called ‘Fear Before’.On Saturday, we didn’t have much left except for some back­ground vocals, so we moved to Paramount stu­dio B.  There, we hap­pened to be able to use the EXACT MIC that Michael Jackson recorded Thriller with.  THE mic.  So, that was fun.  The assis­tant there had lots of inter­est­ing sto­ries as well.  Studio C is where they recorded Led Zeppelin 2.  And it is also sup­pos­edly where a young actor was work­ing a car­pen­tery job (re-​​paneling the walls) in the early/​mid 70’s when he got the gig as Han Solo in some flick called Star Wars.All in all, quite a bit of fun.[image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image]

Where am I? What day is it?

Been work­ing this week at east­west stu­dios in Hollywood.  This place is very his­tor­i­cal, being for­merly Cello, Ocean Way, and the old Western Recorders.  This is where they recorded Pet Sounds.  Working on a project with Drew Brown from OneRepublic.  More later, back to work…

Sunstoned

I dis­ap­peared into a sea of activ­ity for the last cou­ple of weeks, as per usual.  Final band track­ing for Set To Sea has taken place; now just over­dubs of vocals, etc.  The first (offi­cial) song from Telegram is about ready to be mixed, and the first song from Leslie is almost done being mixed.  Also, quite notably, Lee posted a song I from his upcom­ing All Things Bright And Beautiful col­lec­tion.  He and Michael Edwards recorded it ear­lier this year, and I mixed it when I got back from Denver.I dis­ap­peared into the Colorado moun­tains for a few days with the OneRepublic folks, got a nice sun­burn, and then worked on some songs with Eddie Fisher (their drum­mer).  Known Eddie for years, like, 15 actu­ally.  He’s been in the Violets and var­i­ous other projects with some or most of us around here, and is a great friend and fel­low lover of the Verve-​​groove.  Now he, um, tours the world…Still play­ing an extreme game of catch up for the time I was in Denver work­ing on 1R.  Should take me just a few.…oh, months, or so.