Freeborn Sound

Dear Mutt,

Just now in the studio: Leila Albayaty. We’re making a soundtrack album for her recently completed film, Berlin Telegram. Ivan’s Space Echo is rolling on lots of great tunes!

dear Mutt,

Just a quick aside:

By far, the best concert I’ve attended in the last several years by an independent band was played by Insuiciety, in that place on Kastanienallee- Morgenrot or Morgensonne or what ‘s it called? It was a couple of years ago and damn. The album that we subsequently made together, “The Cure For The Truth” happens also, in spite of its flaws, to be perhaps the one I’m most proud of having worked on, ever.

Amusing too, maybe, that the album that gave me my start in the studio biz was by Nikki Sudden, and was called “The Truth Doesn’t Matter.” What’s THAT about?

best,

-p.

I can’t say it enough:

I WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR ARCHIVING YOUR FILES!

Look, I’m really sorry. In the old days, studios had a closet where old tapes were stored. Typically, You’d buy blank tape (expensive!), make a record on it, mix it, and go. The finished tapes would be stuck on a shelf until you either forgot about it or came back a few months later for a sans-voice mix or a percussion mix, whereupon you’d pay an engineer to go find the tape and spool it up again for a remix. After a few years, the tape would have glued itself together, rendering its salvageability questionable at best.

These days, it’s DIFFERENT! Most likely, you’ve recorded in Pro Tools, the data are stored on hard disk, and when you go, the studio will reuse that hard disk because a hard disk’s quality (arguably) isn’t diminished over multiple record passes. What this means, is that if a studio were charged with archiving your files, it would wind up transferring your files to its pile of quickly deteriorating backup disks full of audio data whose significance may be great or small, and whose safety is simply not guaranteed. You’ll probably be busy with a thousand other things, as will I, and when you return months or years later, your data may or may not still be intact and usable. THIS NIGHTMARE SCENARIO IS SOOOOO EASILY AVOIDED!!!!!

Your work is probably important to you. It’s important to me, too, but bear in mind that while you make perhaps one or two CDs this year, I will make literally hundreds. I’d be delighted to have the luxury of worrying about the safety of your material, but I don’t. Before you come to record, buy yourself a hard disk. It can be USB, FireWire, SATA, or ATA; the format doesn’t matter. But let it be the disk for THIS project. C’Mon! A roll of 2 inch tape costs a couple of hundred! A hard disk costs maybe 50! Just buy it! Buy two! Are you crazy? I didn’t think so.

DON’T store your ripped movies on it. DON’T take it with you to Tenerifa. This is your project. EVERY DAY, remind me, in case I forget, that we need to make a BACKUP. NOW! In fact, I won’t be annoyed if you tell me to make a backup when we take a lunch break. Not at all. And when we’re all done, take that disk with you, and store it safely. That way, you KNOW that your data are safe. In fact, I’d recommend making an additional copy (or two), just to be sure. Then, in the years to follow, CHECK THAT DISK at regular intervals, just to be sure that it’s still OK. Should you have concerns, just make another copy. It’s so easy.

That’s the world we live in.

Peace out.