Back in the DJ Lauria Band days, I wrote a power-pop Christmas song entitled "Christmas Morning, 5:00AM". Until that time, we had recorded all of our releases in proper recording studios, either to two-inch tape or, when playing live, DAT. (No worries if you've never heard of DAT. No one had then, either.) This song, however, was the first that we attempted to record entirely ourselves, using state of the art technology. So we mic'd up John's drums and connected two four-track mixers in series, and ran all of that into a Tascam PortaStudio cassette recorder in order to get the rhythm tracks. I then brought the cassette home, played it into my 486DX running Windows 98, and began doing overdubs with n-Track studio V2. Like I said, state of the art.
It went pretty badly, for a number of reasons. The computer couldn't keep up with more than a few tracks playing simultaneously, and adding reverb sent Windows into a deep math crater, out from which it could never climb. I would change a few settings, set it to render a mix, and then walk away for two hours, while it thought and thought and thought. Fixing one EQ setting could take an afternoon. I eventually finished the mix, but no one was really happy with it, and so it sat for twenty years. Recently, I found the CD-R backup, and thought it might be interesting to try to remix this song now, with equipment that actually works. I'll document the process as I go, and hopefully will end up with something worthwhile on the other end.
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AuthorI like to write and record music, and sometimes I like to write about how I like to write and record music. That's this. ArchivesCategories |