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This evening was bass recording part deux. It did not start out well. In fact, I damn near tweaked tonight.
All of our bass intonation problems have been resolved. Somehow or another, though, when we first started recording, something with the minidisc 8 track went horribly awry. After about 25 seconds of recording, everything came to a halt and we got "Disc Error 24" or something like that. Turns out "Disc Error XX" means, according to the manual, that the disc has gotten scratched or damaged and needs to be replaced. Not Cool.
That's where I almost went postal. See, we have four of the six songs for our EP recorded on that disc. They're almost done. I have no way to back them up. (As the 8 Track has no digital out, and no way to copy to another disc.) So...if the disc fails, we're pretty much screwed. I had to shut the whole thing down and bring it back up to even get it to play again. Once I did, I played back the first tune on the disc...
...not good. About 4 digital errors spread out across the first 25 seconds of the song. Most of them, thankfully, are on tracks that don't have anything on them yet -- mostly on the drum tracks. Since drums haven't entered the song yet, we're okay there. A couple of them, however, are on the master to stay. One is particularly bad, on the guitar track. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to remove them using bits of the recordings that I've already mixed down to my computer. Since that part of the song is pretty much just guitar, I should be able to match the volumes and cut and paste. (Assuming we mix the stereo field to be the same way -- which we'll now have to do, at least for the first 25 seconds.)
I'm also praying...absolutely praying...that this was some sort of fluke occurance, and that the disc is not dying. Because when it looked like the disc had died for a minute there, I was in a very unhappy place. To work on something this hard for two months...only for something in the hardware to fail and ruin 2/3rds of it...that would be really upsetting to me. So, hopefully that won't happen.
On the upside, we had no problems after that. All the songs on that disc are now done, the disc is write protected, and we should (theoretically) not be able to lose any more data. We're going to begin mixing this weekend. This disc has got to be done, with a buncha copies made, about one month from today. So, the clock is ticking!
On an introspective note, it was kind of scary to me how much I felt out of control, angry, and lost when I thought we were going to lose, essentially, 2/3rds of the album. That first thought, that the disc was dead and there was nothing we could do to fix it, really scared the shit out of me. I mean -- if we had the time, we could redo it all. However, I don't think any of the band members -- myself included -- would be up for doing all of this again right now. It's been lotsa work, and we're all looking forward to writing more new stuff and playing shows.
Thankfully it turned out that wasn't the case, the disc seems to still work, and while that song won't be perfect, I can probably get it close to what it should be. I don't know...I guess I'm just surprised I'd have such a viceral reaction to what almost happened. I can't decide if it's a good thing -- that I must really care about us finishing this work -- or if it's a bad thing, a wild emotional reaction that I should kind of not be having. It was weird...it was like I was all of a sudden filled with all these virulent emotions, but I didn't know what exactly I was supposed to do to let them out, so I kind of just sat there for a few minutes. Weird.
I'm going to try to write more once again, but it might be fair to mention that 'cause of all this stuff I have to get done over the next few weeks, there are no guarantees.
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