The surge of recording and re-recording for the CD goes on. I’ve replaced most of the backing track of Best of the Blues with a new one, a bit faster. That was easy as it was (a) me and (b) at home. For other work I’ve not wanted to ask the musicians to make the trek out here, so I’ve gone to them with my Boss BT-532, having recorded a mix of the song in question onto it, and recorded them in their homes. Then I have to take the audio tracks off the Boss and integrate them into the original Cubase track on the PC. This entire process is fraught; for the first session with Mary I got to her place and discovered the Flash card in the Boss had erased the songs between leaving the house and getting to hers; the quality of the mix they play along to is compromised by the need to leave most of the card capacity for new recording so they don’t get a good feel for what they’re playing to. Then there’s the visual/auditory task of ‘lining up’ the new tracks with the old in Cubase. Often it’s not until days or even weeks after that I realise some of them are out by milliseconds, and that has a disturbing effect on the song.
Of course in an ideal world I’d be recording in a studio, with good facilities, an engineer who knows what he’s doing and a producer who’s sympathetic to what I’m aiming for but can say ‘no’ at the right times. However, we begin from where we are, and I now have percussion tracks from Nelson and violin and vocal tracks from Mary to integrate over the weekend. Good stuff.