Light at the End of the Tunnel

Today is Friday. My children have all had colds and I woke up with a sore throat. Damn.

BTW, this has really been an extraordinarily short period of time to produce a full blown recording. I was lucky enough to be able to take two full weeks off of work (you know, that real job thing) and put in eight hour days at the studio almost every day. There are still hours and hours of editing and cleaning and mixing to do. But after Sunday we’ll have all of the raw tracks down, and some of the rough mixes I’m coming home with sound pretty darn good.

I called my (real job) supervisor the other day and she said “I can’t believe you’re calling me on your vacation!” To which I said, “Vacation? I can’t wait to get back to work so I can get some rest.”

Some bigger name artists who do have this luxury of time, may take more time to produce their recording. They may have the backing of a label. And some may spend the same amount of hours as I will have in the studio, but they need to spread it out over weeks or months due to schedule.

Also, I do have another luxury. I have a backer, an executive producer. Doug Furth, an investment banker (or something like that) with an interest in producing family quality entertainment (he produced the movie “Come Away Home”) became interested in my music and agreed to back this CD. Having all of the money up front is a tremendous luxury for small independent artists. I constructed a fairly conservative budget for this project which came in at around $15,500.00. I’m already a little over budget for musicians’ fees – I underestimated the number of musicians and their time in studio and their inherent value to the overall recording. But I’ll find other places to cut (perhaps in the artwork department) and luckily I built in a “Misc.” line in the budget; funds for undetermined use. I’m glad I did that but I didn’t want to use it all up in the beginning because I know that something else unforeseen will come up. It always does.

Well, I didn’t post much about the actual recording going on in the studio, and there is some pretty cool stuff. But I’ve got to get down to the studio now, so I’ll write more later and fill you in.