I just produced my first album. Yah... “record producer.” Its kinda weird, since I’m a business guy and engineer. Turns out to be a somewhat long story...but here is the short version. This is the music FileMaker Developer Conference 2009. We had one of my highly talented juniors play the piano in the Hilton ballroom and hallway. Turns out my junior is REALLY good and had written 6 of his own songs. People really liked his playing, and we received lot of compliments.
So I found a local recording studio with a big tuned Yamaha piano, so we recorded an album of Monday. I thought it would be simple. Hey sit down, hit record, then use toast to burn the CD...and we’re out of there. No such luck. Our sound engineer Darryl has a FINELY tuned ear...much more so than I. So as he played he kept marking spots on the recording where he thought miles made a mistake. It sounded good to me, so some of the spots were cleaned up with editing.
Anyway, a 3 minute song gets another 15 minutes of treatment, plus the final rending of the channels to the final song file in Wav (AIFF) format. Suddenly my short recording session turned into 3.5 hours. Luckily the studio did not cost a fortune at $80/hr. At one point, Myles started choking...and was twanging off wrong notes. Uh-oh. Low blood sugar. So I have to basically force feed him with muffins and some juice to get him going again.
After another 20 minutes of practice and digestion of food...Myles was back to fighting trim.
The studio said it was the first time that an album had been created in under 4 hours. Most of the time, people take days, weeks, or months to do the album. I guess a lot of people don’t practice before they go to the studio. I cannot imagine taking week to do a album. Those artist have complicated music. Luckily we only had ONE instrument, and therefore two tracks to mix.
