Painstaking Process, Part Six

I'm sitting here with Gary the engineer as he edits Habanera. Today we're just editing, going through markings we've made over the weeks of things to fix before we get to mixing. For example, just now he found a reminder something to fix in the bass line. He goes to that spot in the recording and sure enough one note in a staccato passage is slightly muffled, probably by his hand. That was an easy fix, as he just grabbed the same note from an earlier repeat of that passage and plopped it in there. In other spots, he hears clicks from punches made quickly where he didn't spend the extra seconds crossfading or precisely aligning the waveforms (apparently, the latter is more seamless but crossfading is faster).

So, this week we've made tremendous progress: We finished the lead vocals on everything except Angelitos Negros. That tune needs a gospel choir, though now we're back to thinking we can get away with four voices, triple tracked for the same sound at a fraction of the price--but wait, that's not all you get with this special offer! I can't wait to hear those choral arrangements sung by humans (ok, professional crack-sight-reading human singers with a flair for gospel).

Earlier this week we worked on Goddess of War--which reminds me, I heard a report on public radio (that news show The World) describing songwriter Michael Franti (Spearhead) and his latest work. Apparently, he's been visiting war-torn areas, and he was playing these sad anti-war songs and the people were like, play us something happy! So he put together this collection of songs that are to help people go on living after the turmoil, though they are also very anti-war. I heard some snippets and thought they bore some similarity to Goddess of War.