Production Update June 03, 2010

Two weeks from tomorrow, we’ll be recording drums, bass, and rhythm guitar at Dark Horse Recording in Nashville! I don’t have a lot of time right now, but wanted to give you a quick update on what I’ve been up to over the last week or so.

- I purchased a DigiDesign Mbox 2 and Installed Pro Tools on my laptop. I didn’t want to install it on my iMac quite yet, as this is the computer that has been running Logic Pro all along, and I would have to do an operating system update to install Pro Tools (from Mac OSX 10.5.1 to OSX 10.5.8). Operating system updates can be a bit scary at times, and may require updates of multiple third-party plug-ins (I’ve been avoiding any updates for the last 10 months). I don’t want to risk having to re-build my whole computer at this 11th hour, so I just installed Pro Tools on my laptop instead. The iMac is much faster and will be used for editing and mixing down the road, but for the time being, the laptop will work great for setting up basic Pro Tools sessions for June 18th at Dark Horse.

- I exported all the sub-mix files from Logic and imported those into Pro Tools. The Pro Tools sessions are basically ready to go except for a few tweaks here and there (I was actually able to set them up much faster than I had anticipated). I will be working on finishing up the Pro Tools sessions over the next several days. I also may possibly mail some DVDs of the Pro Tools sessions to engineer/co-producer Dave Bechtel in Nashville early this week so that all the files can be imported into the Pro Tools system at Dark Horse Recording ahead of time (this will save time the day of recording).

- I began the process of registering my new songs with ASCAP. This is required for radio play (if the songs end up getting played on the radio). I’ll give more details on ASCAP later.

- Today, I’ve been working on organizing a number of hard drives and have been backing up a bunch of old files so I have more room on my drives. This isn’t the most exciting thing, but is important as I will need two drives on the day of recording – one which we’ll record to, and one which I’ll use for backup. Unfortunately, I may have to drop $150-$180 and get a larger and faster Firewire 7200 rpm drive which will be used throughout the entire recording, editing, and mixing stages.

- This Sunday, I will be meeting with guitarist Matt Meyer to go over guitar parts again. He will be joining us at Dark Horse on June 18th.

- Over the next two weeks, I’ll be listening to the demos very carefully and will be adding additional notes to the Nashville number charts we’ll be using at Dark Horse.

- That’s it for now! More updates are on their way!