Been having a great time this week, away on a very relaxing job trip, mainly spent being vaguely technical in the shadows, watching executives talk themselves successful in a windowless conference room underneath The Home of Rugby, Twickenham Stadium, just to the leafy left of London. Thankfully, tired sporting analogies were for once, not crowbarred into every presentation; so absent, in fact, was any reference to our location, that we may as well have been in a business park, on a bypass, near Nuneaton.
It’s been a long week, but my days have been so simple and the hours so short, that following a daily, brief jog along the Thames riverbank path at Richmond, I’ve spent some wonderfully profitable evenings, wrestling with a knotty production problem…
Ever since last year, when I upgraded my Blague Central Studio gear, from 40 tracks of late-90s dedicated hard-disk recorders, to the largest, whizziest Mac I could afford, plus a tableful of control surfaces (to salve my 80s-pop-kid-soul’s desire for the analogue), I’ve had that awkward feeling; the one that creeps up the back of your neck and lets you know you’ve missed something, you’re ignoring something that needs attention before sooner or later, it bites you.
It was this:
I have two BTF albums’ worth of song multitracks, stored on increasingly obsolete backup media with no direct access to them.
These songs form the bedrock of my identity and existence as Bikini Test Failure, yet beyond the stereo mixes on the albums, they are, to stretch a metaphor, a closed book.
I’ve not missed many, but more than one TAXI.com sync. offer in the past year has requested instrumental mixes of my type of music.
I’ve NO idea why, it seems ridiculous now, but this was something I singularly failed to do back then. Not one song.
Rule number 37: ALWAYS run an instrumental mix!
Coupled with my personal 50th anniversary season’s medium-term plan (for timescale, read: “before I die”) to take BTF out live, preferably solo, preferably at festivals, (rather than a return to the likes of Manchester’s Roadhouse), it’s clear I’ll need additional “backing tracks” of some kind. Of course this too requires access to the innards of those recordings.
So I spent a couple of weeks last month, collating the media: Zip Disk, CDR and wait-for-it, DAT tape backups (I had to buy a DAT machine again - a fabulous Tascam DA-20 on Ebay for £80GBP) and transferring them, song track by song track, into Logic.
Then the REAL problem started; because these tracks were originally across three playback machines (lately sold) and now I’m transferring them to the Mac sometimes eight at a time, sometimes singly… THEY ARE NO LONGER SYNCHED-UP!!
40 tracks of audio per song, all the same tempo, but all now starting at slightly different points in the timeline. Worse, having been originally recorded using a click, I now find that the clock speed of my 1990s Mac differs from that of the new one, EVERSO SLIGHTLY! Enough to require an 89 BPM recording to be played back at 89.05 BPM. Tiny, but throwing any track out by half-way through.
It feels anathema these days to be lining up digitally recorded audio tracks by eye and ear, using trial and error, but after MUCH thought and experimentation, it seems this is my only option, in order to recreate playable, original multitrack masters.
The GOOD news is: it works. What’s more, the results are very pleasing. Look! Listen!
And wish me luck with the rest.
