… it’s doing it twice.
For a while now I’ve been in thrall of the two albums Jem Godfrey and his cronies released under the collective name Frost*, Milliontown and Experiments in Mass Appeal. Lately I’ve been A/B-ing these albums against the work I’m doing on Describing An Arc.
As a result of Careful Listening™ I’ve modified the plug-in chain on the 2-bus, that is, the end of the mixing chain wherein all channels and sub-busses get summed to a final output and a finished mix, for pretty much all the songs, and things are sounding both more compact and more cinematic now. I’m happy with the way the songs are gelling, and I hope you will be too when I eventually send it out into the wild.
But as I came to the first song on the second album, Maze of Mirrors, I found myself quite unable to work this new magick. At some point OS X, in its confusion and trying to keep up with my incessant mouse clicks and file dragging, must have thought that I wanted to delete the session and most of the tracking I had done for the song, and duly deposited it in the trash. In the course of deleting something else that I truly did want to delete, and without noticing that the MoM session was already sitting there, I wound up deleting the session along with that which really did need deleting.
Yes, I’ve no one to blame but myself for the oversight, or maybe some of the blame lies with this latest rev of OS X that I’ve installed (10.6.8) and how easily it gets confused when it has lots to do under the hood besides listen to me trying to interact with it. I’m not actually certain whether this MacBook Pro was designed to run Snow Leopard; it came out of the box with the previous rev installed, 10.5 (Leopard), and I’ve just been merrily updating it as I went along, and fretting about how long it takes now to boot the thing up. Soon it’ll be time to spring for a solid-state drive, I think, but prices haven’t dropped enough yet on the size I’d need to replace the drive that’s in it.
Anyway, the session is gone, save for a few audio files that wound up in a completely different folder. From these I’ve managed to construct a new session, to which I will need to add a new drum guide for Paula to track over, and new scratch vocals for me and Pete to replace. (The fretless bass model that Josh will eventually replace survived the purge.)
This track is kind of important to me, as it marks a reunion of sorts. The friends I’ve selected to appear on the track are my former partners in Radiant City, the mid-90s band that preceded @Fulcrum. In fact, they wrote a good chunk of the music on this track; I supplied lyrics and music to accompany the lyrics, and wove that and the music they’d written around each other. If I had to pin the song down to a specific style, imagine the three vocalists in Yes being backed up by mid-80s era Rush.
So it’s important that I have a session created against which they can track. Hence, doing it all again.
Nothin’ left to do but smile, smile, smile.