Yes its true. I was in the studio until 5 a.m. last night. It was ridiculous, but I loved every second of it. I was engineering my artist, Tirzah, from the 1 - 4 a.m. slot in the main studio. Now normally the manager never engineers for their own artist, but we are really short on engineers after we had to have 3 quit because of being too busy. So now instead of engineering for one artist, I have two - Tirzah and Jon Li. Jon is a good kid - plays piano rock. He is improving vocally, but he is an unbelievable keyboard player. If you ask him to play any song he has heard even once, he will whip it out - Christian to Mainstream, Folk to Rap.
But back to last night, we were still tracking (meaning recording the tracks) at 3:50a.m. Now normally after you track, you spend hours editing, mixing, getting your levels right, tweaking stuff, eliminating noises, EQing every instrument, putting reverb on everything, tune up the vocals, etc etc. Basically, there is just a ton to be done, and we had to be out in 10 minutes (including saving the file which takes a few minutes to convert to a playable file). Luckily, while I was recording Tirzah I was adjusting all these things since I knew we would be tight on time. We ended up running about 10 minutes over into the next people's time (the 4a.m. to 9a.m. slot!) but got it done. I only got to listen to the song one time through to adjust levels and delete stuff before we mixed down.
So during our 9:30a.m. class, all the artists have to play their songs for the whole class, as well as the two directors (Tom and Warren), Danara from Columbia Records, and Will Gray who is an incredible musician/lyricist. The four faculty were lined up American Idol style and just posted instant messages in real time to the projector in our cafe. Their comments ripped apart our songs - from vocals to too much bass to saying "this has potential but right now it sucks bad". So...needless to say, the artists and engineers got their reality check on the day after working so hard on all these songs. With the three engineers having to quit, I ended up mixing/editing 3 artists songs. Josh's was a harder rock song, Jon did a piano rock tune, and Tirzah did a vocal/piano lead soft rock song. I liked all the songs, which was cool, but they all turned out at different levels of quality. I messed up on some panning stuff for Josh and the EQ was off for some of Jon's song (and both had some poorly recorded vocals not done by me). However, Tirzah's recording, who I spent by FAR the least amount of time on, everyone loved! Tom later told Tirzah that it was the "song of the day" - so we were really excited.
Turns out those late nights can be worth it! I am going to Boston with everyone this weekend and can't wait. I think it will be good to get a break from here, but I still love it. In a half an hour we are watching the movie "Spinal Tap" which I guess is both of my professor's favorite movie. Tomorrow morning we will talk about it.
Check out Tirzah's performance at her featured CMC Live performance at a quick website I made for her at:
www.virb.com/tirzah
That's all.
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1 comment:
it definitely sounds like you are having an AMAZING time. it seems as if you're already picking up the lingo: sick nasty. haha. pretty soon you'll be using the word "wicked" for everything. it's okay though. my bostonian influences have still stuck with me from this past summer.
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