I had the great pleasure of recording in the studio for a day with Andy Suzuki, Karl Vincent and M. B. Gordy in January of this year. It was a wonderful studio called Park Hill Studios in Hemet, CA. We had a wonderful time, laid down 6 new tracks. And at the end of the day, I got to take the master tapes home - on DA-88s, which was the format this studio uses.
You would think it would be easy to find a place to get someone to run me a CD off the DA-88s, so I could listen to the tracks - but no. Seems that this format fell out of favor about 8 years ago, when hard-drives became the basic place to "record" onto, bypassing tape altogether.
So what I really needed is to find someone with a couple of DA-88 machines, so they could transfer the traks onto my hard drive using Protools for the basic program, and then get a rough mix burned onto a CD to reference.
Well, almost 2 months later, the project is almost done. The two people I found that had the machines both discovered that they had not used them for so long, they were not functioning, and they needed to be cleaned before the transfer could be done. Finally, the wonderful Craig Pettigrew was able to help me get the transfer done, but did not have the equipment to get into the editing/transfer part of the project. So this will go to my good friend Carl Sealove this week, and then, by sometime next week I should actually be able to LISTEN to what the hell we did back in January.
This got me thinking - what about my other albums? Are they also on formats that are basically not being used any more? IS it worth updating them as well?
I found that the albums since Midnight Brew have all been recorded onto hard drives, and I have them all stored away - of course I should try starting them up, to see if they even function any more.
The first 2 albums it looks like I do not have the 16 track masters, I just have the master CD and some digital tape back-ups. No going back there to remaster, I don't think. I found something that looked like a HUGE floppy disc, about the size of an old 45 RPM single. Don't think too many people have a machine that will read that stuff anymore.
Life gets more and more confusing. At least I don't have to find a place to bake my 2 inch master tapes anymore.
Have a great night - signing off now
