Recently I’ve been hanging with a new friend who I get outdoors with to hit little white balls on a field of green. He’s a graphic computer artist that used to have a band that almost hit the big time. He’s of course older than I. He’s been fortunate in music. Before he moved to LA he recorded a solo album that is to be his opus. Due to costs and time he has it recorded but the mix never happened. Thus being the good friend that I am and knowing that my mixing skills are starting to rival the big boys with famous names I offered to see if I could help him.
He came over with his hard drive and gave me the session of one song. It was recorded using Pro-Tools which meant I’d have to go to a friend to open the session and output the tracks as I work in Logic.
Early this morning I tromped over to my buddy’s studio with the files. Thirteen gigs: 13 Gigs!!! It’s fucking huge. In all the songs I’ve ever done even at HD (96k) recording quality, no song has gone over 5 or 6 gigs. I’m talking pretty large, complicated mixes. In the first attempt of opening song it crashed my friends computer after taking 20 minutes of attempting to load. Then we tried again with an older file in the folder. It opened within 2 minutes, but still had many issues. In three words: It’s a mess.
I don’t even know how to describe it. To put it lightly despite him telling me it was professionally recorded, it’s probably the least professional session I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of a session where I went to a working “pro” studio to record guitar parts for an artist to have as backing tracks. The drummer was painfully terrible. The bassist and I were not screwing things up, so I eventually spoke up and asked the engineer to turn on a click track (that’s right we were recording to the drummer and not a click) so that the bassist and I could put our parts down and be done with it. They could worry about a drummer later. The response was: that would be complicated…
Complicated?!? It’s as simple as clicking a mouse on a software button!!! It’s simple. Needless to say I’m betting that those session files were complicated, only because it was someone working at a professional studio that had no idea what they were doing. The sad thing is, someone was paying money for all of that. To put it mildly, if I walked into a studio for a session of my music and this was happening, I’d ask for a refund or not pay and walk right back out.
I have the feeling that my buddy was at a professional studio, but the cats working it may not have been so professional. I could be wrong. I wasn’t there. But frankly, if I had sessions like this in my life everyday, I’d never want to record. Professional to me means, they know what they’re doing, and that’s not complicated. Being organized is a massive factor to being professional. At least to me.
Which is what brings me to today’s choice. Get On With It by Val Emmich. It’s essentially the attitude that is needed right now for a lot of things. The economy, and well, this mix I’m going to be dealing with. I like the driving piano at the beginning of this song. I realize it’s a sampled piano, but the pulse is something that helps get my foot tapping and my blood pumping.
Get On With It is what I’d like to bash into the heads of our presidential candidates and even our current lame duck. Don’t know what a lame duck is, then it’d be best to go back to your American History class.
In the meantime, I’ll bop around the room to Val Emmich. I like his voice, it’s got a classic feel to me. I rent old 80’s movies once in a while and there’s definitely some similarity of Val to artists from those 80’s pop bands. One thing that jumps to mind is I’ll Stop The World and Melt With You. I don’t know who did that song, but Val reminds me of that guy singing.
The chorus pops in nicely with additional layers and pulls the song up another notch. All good stuff.
So come and get on with it. Buy Val’s music, you’ll like it!