CD production madness

Thursday, March 20th, 2008 | 11:59 pm and filed in Music, Friends.

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The Ulysses project with Goh has been on hold until we can get back into Tiny Telephone, so he decided to print a new run of his first album “Daylight Savings”. Despite being swamped with another major project, I took on the responsibility of trying to deal with the layout for the production run. The tricky part of this was that it needed to go out by the end of February in order for the product to arrive for his gig on March 18th. This was somewhat important since it was a party for the SF Asian American Film Festival, and there were a lot of people planning to attend.

Nathalie Roland developed the artwork, and my cousin, Tamiko who is very talented with print jobs, offered some color suggestions to balance with Nathalie’s work. The February Deadline came around and it looked like the layout would be finished in time.

But… realized that Goh didn’t have anyone finalize the CD master. So I had half a day to work on mastering the CD. We had remastered his album a couple of years ago, and the Waveburner project was saved on my workstation. The problem was that a few bonus tracks needed to be added and balanced. I was under the gun to get the master finished, and didn’t have enough time to polish things - so i kinda effed up the final.

So on March 18th, the day of the gig, the CDs arrived about 3 hours before the show - just in the nick of time! I was happy that the finished product didn’t look like purple hell, but I was still worried about the audio. People were buying the CD at the show, and we had not even taken a test listen to make sure the replication was free of errors!

I took a listen and it’s not bad. The music is strong enough that people will forgive the inconsistent mastering. That level jump on the bonus track is obvious, but not obnoxious.

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