Leisure and its antithesis...

These days I feel as though someone just invented the weekend and I'm among the first to benefit from it.   Yes, I'm talking about the schedule change that happened at work now more than a month ago.  Having two full days off is just amazing.  At first, right about the middle of the first full day off I would always get this slight feeling of "oh crap, I gotta go back to work tomorrow," followed almost immediately by the relief that I don't have to go back to work tomorrow.  Slowly but surely, though, it's turned into just the random acknowledgement throughout the day of the fact that I don't have to go back to work tomorrow.

And that I can do more stuff!!!  So tomorrow a friend and I are going to swing by the pre Bastille Day festivities in the city at Cercle Rouge in Soho on W. Broadway.  And today, I already had lunch in the city and walked around Washington Square Park!

And on top of all that leisure, I'm still getting tons of work done!  I had another voice over gig that I was able to finish and submit a first draft for plus, I'm pushing forward on all the tedium in this next stage of the Samurai film: editing all of my recorded takes.  I found out that I accidentally recorded over one of the takes so I'm having to call back the performer to redo that one little snippet.  It sucks but I have to do it and it's my gaff so I have pay him out of pocket for his time.  Only fair.  But it's a pretty good lesson even if I was anticipating such a mistake happening and still thought I had prepared enough to make sure that I got everything I needed out of him.  I printed up a score for him, wrote time codes and lengths on each cue, down to the shortest one, even wrote notes for myself about what kind of extra sounds to get out of him after we were done with the main cues so that I'd have extra material for the fight scenes.   But alas, I still managed to miss something.

What happened was, a few times I didn't start a new file for each new recording and expected that the program I use, Sound Forge, would just record from the end of the file but instead, somehow, in one of the files, the playback cursor reset to the beginning of the file and it recorded over the first takes of that cue, including every single take of the first part of the cue.  Ack!

So, luckily this only happened with one file but initially, I thought I had lost a lot more.  Somehow when I transferred all the raw files over to my Macbook via dropbox, not everything was showing up.  So I went back to the PC and checked and was able to find the rest, all except for those takes of the first part of cue #4.

You live and you learn.

Anyway, I should mention that the takes sound awesome and I had so much fun recording James, the Shakuhachi player.  The instrument is extremely expressive and James knows it inside and out, extended techniques and all.  So I have some neat sounds from him that I promised I wouldn't sample in addition to the beautiful interpretations of my music.

I'm going to be posting this stuff for sure once the film is done…which I can't really say when that will be at the moment.  Hopefully, I'll have my work done in about a week.  I'm also adding Japanese Taiko drums and potentially other percussion instruments and mixing and mastering everything.  So that should take some time.  This is a pretty tedious part of the process and my right hand is starting to hurt a little (most noticeably in yoga classes in downward facing dog) from using the track pad on my Macbook so much.

That having been said, you guessed it, I have to go to sleep so I can be up bright and early for another of those yoga classes.  And who knows maybe I'll get a little bit more done on the film score and try to do some voice over auditions as well before the Bastille Day fun.