It is 10:56am on Saturday, July 11, 2009

As you know, my life right now is totally immersed in the recording of Christmas In A Small Town - my new CD which will release in early October. Since it is the music that is consuming my life - it is the music that finds it's way to these blogs.

A music engineer is responsible for the technical aspects of recording. They set up the proper microphones, set recording levels, hit record and play, rewind, and fast forward. They man the controls so to speak. A poorly engineered project would mean there is noise on the tracks (like hums or buzzes, or too much room noise) and that the recording levels might be too low - creating more noise - or too hot - creating spikes, pops, or distortion on a particular take. When you have 30-60 tracks to 'lay down', all of these must be clean or the recording suffers in the end, no matter how wonderful anyone played or sang.

Now, if I'm the performer AND the engineer - that means I have to hit record, run to a microphone (yes, in another room thank you), run back to stop - and you should guess how many miles I have ran doing this?

Ninety percent of all the tracks for this project will be engineered by yours truly. It is this 'engineering' that has been so tedious. Once I go to Nashville for the remaining 10 percent of the tracks, I will be in a studio where they have engineers to do there what I'm doing now.

It's actually kinda cool being an engineer, because you get to play with all the knobs. Speaking of knobs, I had a photo of a physical sound console a few blogs back - however, most of the controls are again - in the computer. The photo above is what my digital console looks like. It is part of the program used to record the project. Here is where, eq (equalization), fx (reverb, delay), panning (L-R), and all sorts of other musical tricks happen.

So, I'm being an engineer, producer, and performer. Coming up - what is a producer - what do they do?