May 12th - Where did the last 2 weeks go?
Welcome to the, not so active BLOG of SAXBOY Greg Vail. The line at the top of the page seems to be the point as of late. A Day in the Life of a Sax Player.
We in the arts and entertainment industry live a very different life. Things can settle in for a while and feel pretty normal, even though our hours are always crazy. But then, something happens that turns everything upside down for the 12 thousandth time. At this point, all that resembled normalcy is stopped, and the real crazy stuff kicks in for a while.
That's exactly what happened this past 2 weeks. I was working on the NEW Traditional Hymns CD and making progress, and I had a conversation Sunday, April 30th that changed things up till now.
I was leaving my Church services that night and my Worship Pastor said, "We gotta get that new CD done for the conference in 2 weeks. When can I get the masters?"
He was referring to a started and sitting project I was going to do for the conference in MAY, and I had not been scheduled and nothing had been said about doing anything for it so I kept working on the NEW Hymns CD with Bobby. Well, what did I have done on APRIL 30th? I had taken album tracks, dumped them in my computer and experimented with Orchestration, using my EWI and Pro Tools Audio tracked a dozen or so tracks on 2 songs his son had released on a new CD. My intention was to switch out the vocal CD mixes with tracks minus vocals and track sax for these 2 songs. Then I wanted to record my friends song, Alva Copeland, Reach One More, and that track was very Orchestrated already so I needed to input the track on the computer and track sax to it.
Monday morning, the first, I woke up at 6 AM and started looking for the sessions and tracks for the first 2 new songs. This is how my week started out. I spent 2 hours looking for the sessions, searching song titles, file extensions, everything. I finally realized I had followed a friends suggestion a month ago and moved all the tracks to an external drive to help Pro Tools work better on my PC. I wasted the first 2 hours looking for tracks that were a foot away in an external drive. It was really only the beginning.
It was 2 or 3 AM Monday night and I had called in the army with all of my friends starting to dodge calls because nothing was working right. It ended up that the track files I got from the studio were from an older version of Pro Tools that did nit have a PC compatibility option. My Good friend Gordon Rustvold drove an hour to help and then went back home to get his portable MAC system to try and convert the files to PC for me. He ended up leaving the MAC stuff here for the day, just in case. By 3 AM I had the 3 NEW songs loaded into my PC, in files with the added orchestrations and everything lined up to start tracking Sax, but it was too late and had to wait till morning.
Over the next few days I fought my PC slowing down, freezing, defraging every night and running Norton throughout the day to keep things functioning. I had some pretty serious editing to do on my Orchestra parts now that I had studio monitors and could hear lots of little things. The Sax tracked pretty easy but mixing became a huge issue.
I had never mixed so many tracks before. Taking a stereo background and mixing in a full Orchestra and Sax on top was mind boggling. I think I mixed these 2 songs 4 different times, thinking they were done each time I was.
Tracking pretty much went down Tuesday-Thursday. Friday I had to buy 2 gigs of ram to get the mixes to play and bounce them to audio. Friday-Saturday was mix time. Then so was Sunday really late and Monday morning again.
Now, in the middle of this I was rehearsing for and recording a live DVD 2 hours away in San Diego for a great gospel singer and worship leader, Charles Billingsley. No little gig here. Melvin Davis on Bass and Paul Jackson Jr, on guitar with an all star band. This went on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night (I had my club gig that Saturday night till 1 AM and Saddleback Church Services Sunday morning) and Afternoon dress rehearsals with the recording that Sunday Night.
That was a little stress in the middle of the CD Crunch!!
I tried to get the tracks handed off for Mastering and maybe a little mixing help but it did not work out that way. I had to get final mixes done and got to meet with Wally Grant to Master Monday morning. Wally had mastered the old Gospel Truth so I knew it would go pretty quick. We worked 11 to 2 and I walked out with mastered CDs. They sounded great and Wally said it was pretty easy; I had done a good job.
YEAH!!
The Art Work had been started a while back by my friend Shannon Kennedy. She had the cover designed and the rest in her head but really could not finish till I gave her the rest the print to set. Thanks to the DVD, I did not get the print finished before I had to leave for San Diego Friday. Saturday Afternoon the files were uploaded to the server but no on was in the office to tell.
With the Mastering on Monday and exhaustion I was feeling, the Masters were scheduled to drop off at the plant Tuesday Morning. I got up Tuesday and made the drop. Then got home and called the printer to make sure we had gone to print. He had not looked at the files yet. Then they needed to be proofed and I authorized a PDF file proofing. I got the Proofs later Tuesday and looked them over, OKed them and called the printer to see when we would go to print. The issue was the conference that as of Tuesday was 7 days away. I was feeling some serious stress.
The printer got back to me on Wednesday and said. "You know how these things work. A normal turn around is around 7 days, but we will get it out as soon as we can." I pressed for a proposed completion and he said next Tuesday or Wednesday.
Now the issue of timing is, the printer has to get done before the Manufacturing Plant can do very much. The plant was offering a 1 day turn around but at 750 dollars for the rush.
When the Plant emailed needing confirmation of rush status, they explained that I would now be responsible for the full $750.00 charge to keep the availability open and cover when ever the print was actually done.
This all happened yesterday, Thursday. I had to look it all over really close. If the Printer was not done till Wednesday, I could possibly be getting the art in to the plant late Wednesday, meaning that the one day rush at $750.00 would be Thursday with pick up on Friday, time unknown. Friday is going to be the last day of the conference I was trying to get this all done for.
To commit to a rush fee and very likely miss the very thing I was rushing for seemed ludicrous. I had to let the Plant know yesterday or the 750 was spent.
After all the crazy rushing around and NO SLEEP for a week and a half, I sadly pulled the project off the schedule at the Plant and had her rewrite the Purchase Order for a standard 7-10 day production to save all the extra money.
It was a big let down. I still needed to get this CD Finished and it is done now; CDs should be here by the Monday after next.
So, the last 2 days have been dealing with business loose ends, track and song licenses, calls to everyone to make sure all the ducks are lined up and no one will be suing me come June 1st.
The Website work was started late last night and has gone all day today. See the Update on the Home Page, added Sound Clips, Updated CD Catalog, NEW GOSPEL CDs GOSPEL Music Home Page and NEW Gospel Truth Revisited CD Pages all now online.
Scanning art, manipulating it and uploading it to servers, mp3 uploads and edits, and a bunch of HTML later....
I have been using the time away from pushing the CD to an early arrival, and getting all the web stuff ready for the CDs birthday. I need to get this done and off my plate because I do have a project that I really want to finish that has seen NO progress over the past 2 weeks.
So, I will post when these CDs are available. The Audio Clips and some of the NEW Site pages are up now to look at. Back to work on the Hymns CD - you know - old Hymns done smooth and cool jazz.
BTW - I still have the Conference to play at starting Tuesday, 7 AM and a huge Yamaha show with a host of huge names that can't be published at this time, but pretty dang cool. Yamaha rehearsals start 11 AM Wednesday till 11PM and 9 AM Thursday till the end of the show around midnight; and yes, the money is great.
A Day In The Life of a sax player...............................
We in the arts and entertainment industry live a very different life. Things can settle in for a while and feel pretty normal, even though our hours are always crazy. But then, something happens that turns everything upside down for the 12 thousandth time. At this point, all that resembled normalcy is stopped, and the real crazy stuff kicks in for a while.
That's exactly what happened this past 2 weeks. I was working on the NEW Traditional Hymns CD and making progress, and I had a conversation Sunday, April 30th that changed things up till now.
I was leaving my Church services that night and my Worship Pastor said, "We gotta get that new CD done for the conference in 2 weeks. When can I get the masters?"
He was referring to a started and sitting project I was going to do for the conference in MAY, and I had not been scheduled and nothing had been said about doing anything for it so I kept working on the NEW Hymns CD with Bobby. Well, what did I have done on APRIL 30th? I had taken album tracks, dumped them in my computer and experimented with Orchestration, using my EWI and Pro Tools Audio tracked a dozen or so tracks on 2 songs his son had released on a new CD. My intention was to switch out the vocal CD mixes with tracks minus vocals and track sax for these 2 songs. Then I wanted to record my friends song, Alva Copeland, Reach One More, and that track was very Orchestrated already so I needed to input the track on the computer and track sax to it.
Monday morning, the first, I woke up at 6 AM and started looking for the sessions and tracks for the first 2 new songs. This is how my week started out. I spent 2 hours looking for the sessions, searching song titles, file extensions, everything. I finally realized I had followed a friends suggestion a month ago and moved all the tracks to an external drive to help Pro Tools work better on my PC. I wasted the first 2 hours looking for tracks that were a foot away in an external drive. It was really only the beginning.
It was 2 or 3 AM Monday night and I had called in the army with all of my friends starting to dodge calls because nothing was working right. It ended up that the track files I got from the studio were from an older version of Pro Tools that did nit have a PC compatibility option. My Good friend Gordon Rustvold drove an hour to help and then went back home to get his portable MAC system to try and convert the files to PC for me. He ended up leaving the MAC stuff here for the day, just in case. By 3 AM I had the 3 NEW songs loaded into my PC, in files with the added orchestrations and everything lined up to start tracking Sax, but it was too late and had to wait till morning.
Over the next few days I fought my PC slowing down, freezing, defraging every night and running Norton throughout the day to keep things functioning. I had some pretty serious editing to do on my Orchestra parts now that I had studio monitors and could hear lots of little things. The Sax tracked pretty easy but mixing became a huge issue.
I had never mixed so many tracks before. Taking a stereo background and mixing in a full Orchestra and Sax on top was mind boggling. I think I mixed these 2 songs 4 different times, thinking they were done each time I was.
Tracking pretty much went down Tuesday-Thursday. Friday I had to buy 2 gigs of ram to get the mixes to play and bounce them to audio. Friday-Saturday was mix time. Then so was Sunday really late and Monday morning again.
Now, in the middle of this I was rehearsing for and recording a live DVD 2 hours away in San Diego for a great gospel singer and worship leader, Charles Billingsley. No little gig here. Melvin Davis on Bass and Paul Jackson Jr, on guitar with an all star band. This went on Friday night, Saturday afternoon and night (I had my club gig that Saturday night till 1 AM and Saddleback Church Services Sunday morning) and Afternoon dress rehearsals with the recording that Sunday Night.
That was a little stress in the middle of the CD Crunch!!
I tried to get the tracks handed off for Mastering and maybe a little mixing help but it did not work out that way. I had to get final mixes done and got to meet with Wally Grant to Master Monday morning. Wally had mastered the old Gospel Truth so I knew it would go pretty quick. We worked 11 to 2 and I walked out with mastered CDs. They sounded great and Wally said it was pretty easy; I had done a good job.
YEAH!!
The Art Work had been started a while back by my friend Shannon Kennedy. She had the cover designed and the rest in her head but really could not finish till I gave her the rest the print to set. Thanks to the DVD, I did not get the print finished before I had to leave for San Diego Friday. Saturday Afternoon the files were uploaded to the server but no on was in the office to tell.
With the Mastering on Monday and exhaustion I was feeling, the Masters were scheduled to drop off at the plant Tuesday Morning. I got up Tuesday and made the drop. Then got home and called the printer to make sure we had gone to print. He had not looked at the files yet. Then they needed to be proofed and I authorized a PDF file proofing. I got the Proofs later Tuesday and looked them over, OKed them and called the printer to see when we would go to print. The issue was the conference that as of Tuesday was 7 days away. I was feeling some serious stress.
The printer got back to me on Wednesday and said. "You know how these things work. A normal turn around is around 7 days, but we will get it out as soon as we can." I pressed for a proposed completion and he said next Tuesday or Wednesday.
Now the issue of timing is, the printer has to get done before the Manufacturing Plant can do very much. The plant was offering a 1 day turn around but at 750 dollars for the rush.
When the Plant emailed needing confirmation of rush status, they explained that I would now be responsible for the full $750.00 charge to keep the availability open and cover when ever the print was actually done.
This all happened yesterday, Thursday. I had to look it all over really close. If the Printer was not done till Wednesday, I could possibly be getting the art in to the plant late Wednesday, meaning that the one day rush at $750.00 would be Thursday with pick up on Friday, time unknown. Friday is going to be the last day of the conference I was trying to get this all done for.
To commit to a rush fee and very likely miss the very thing I was rushing for seemed ludicrous. I had to let the Plant know yesterday or the 750 was spent.
After all the crazy rushing around and NO SLEEP for a week and a half, I sadly pulled the project off the schedule at the Plant and had her rewrite the Purchase Order for a standard 7-10 day production to save all the extra money.
It was a big let down. I still needed to get this CD Finished and it is done now; CDs should be here by the Monday after next.
So, the last 2 days have been dealing with business loose ends, track and song licenses, calls to everyone to make sure all the ducks are lined up and no one will be suing me come June 1st.
The Website work was started late last night and has gone all day today. See the Update on the Home Page, added Sound Clips, Updated CD Catalog, NEW GOSPEL CDs GOSPEL Music Home Page and NEW Gospel Truth Revisited CD Pages all now online.
Scanning art, manipulating it and uploading it to servers, mp3 uploads and edits, and a bunch of HTML later....
I have been using the time away from pushing the CD to an early arrival, and getting all the web stuff ready for the CDs birthday. I need to get this done and off my plate because I do have a project that I really want to finish that has seen NO progress over the past 2 weeks.
So, I will post when these CDs are available. The Audio Clips and some of the NEW Site pages are up now to look at. Back to work on the Hymns CD - you know - old Hymns done smooth and cool jazz.
BTW - I still have the Conference to play at starting Tuesday, 7 AM and a huge Yamaha show with a host of huge names that can't be published at this time, but pretty dang cool. Yamaha rehearsals start 11 AM Wednesday till 11PM and 9 AM Thursday till the end of the show around midnight; and yes, the money is great.
A Day In The Life of a sax player...............................
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