CONSIDERABLY LESS THAN ALL ABOUT THAT BASS

A huge thank you to the generous Michael Sundlin for loaning me his lovely bass!

This was an opportunity to chart the boundless abyss that is my comprehensive lack of prowess as a bass player, failing utterly to play anything resembling the bass line I’d imagined for one of the tracks I’m working on. I was going for “Pixies meets the Flaming Lips”; what I achieved instead was “this guy only knows how to play guitar, so he tries to get by playing chords on the bass, which generally misses the point of the instrument”. Totally didn’t work.

But I did mess around with another (much slower) song, plunking along mostly on the root of each chord, and that actually worked pretty well. I’ll just get somebody else to play bass on that other track. Because as it turns out, I am not even remotely about that bass.

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MINIDISC REDUX!

Recently I’ve been resuscitating a “sinner-songwriter” recording project I started almost 20 years ago. Engaging every lateral move I could think of between CPUs, CDRs, operating systems, DAWs, and dongles, I finally managed to unlock all the sessions and revamp them as projects in my current Nuendo system.

There was only one file I couldn’t find, which was a piano performance I tracked in my friend Ben’s living room, back when we were housemates. I wrote it off and redid the performance using a virtual piano, which was fine, but it still bugged me because it just wasn’t the same.

Finally I remembered that what I was sifting through were WAV files, but that the many of the source tracks-- including the piano-- had originally been recorded to minidisc. Minidisc, folks! And do I still have all those minidiscs from the early 2000s? You better believe it!

So I unearthed the boxes of MDs, and lo and behold, found the piano performance after about an hour of rifling through them. The disc was labeled and everything. I found one of my minidisc players-- my first one, not even the newer Sony that does actual digital transfer of files-- and was happy to discover that it still worked.

I input the audio into Nuendo-- complete with creaks of the piano bench and that annoying whir the MD recorder made every once in a while-- and I was happy to hear that I’d done a couple of mouth clicks to sync with the countoff I’d done on muted guitar strings previously. The session’s legacy tracks are now complete, waiting for edit and mix!

SOVIET SLEEP EXPERIMENT: AUDIO POST ASSIST, FEATURE FILM

Recently I’ve been assisting with audio post on the feature film “The Soviet Sleep Experiment”. Directed by Barry Andersson, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Chris Kattan, the film premieres this Friday 10/18, 5:10 PM at Twin Cities Film Festival. I engineered and edited some of the ADR, as well as filling in some Foley, sound effects editing, and atmospheric ambience for mixer Jonathan Siri Mohs. From the spreadsheet of requests from the dialog editor, I noticed that a lot of screaming and other loud/ harsh vocalizations were needed. So I set up a more easily “punished” dynamic mic in the booth alongside the usual boom, so I could flip back and forth between them as needed. Turned out to be a good plan. Looking forward to hearing how it all worked out in the mix.