Round Two (whatever)
Ok.
The grad school application process has a reputation for being strenuous, and this past week justified whatever dread I harbored about the process one hundred fold. After months of planning, after days of using my pent up energy to complete what I could (filling out forms, stuffing envelopes, hounding professors for recommendation letters, the last of which just got to me two days ago), and after weeks of back and forth emails, the only component left was the most important: The Session.
I needed another recording session, so I scheduled one about a month ago. I also sent out the charts in advance. I waited so long to do it because I needed a saxophone player to get back to Columbus from his first semester at grad school in Chicago. He finally got here, then three days before the session, my bass player backed out.
Rescheduling proved impossible. My sound engineer couldn’t do it Tuesday, my sax player was out Wednesday, the bass player canceled the original Thursday date, the sound engineer couldn’t do it Friday, setting up the microphones the night before and having a different sound guy press ‘record’ was out of the question due to the risks of leaving expensive microphones in a room overnight, doing the session Saturday was out of the question because of the December first deadline, and figuring all this out took the better part of Tuesday, on the phone, back and forth, for hours. Out of necessity, then, I’m going to opt out of the free recording at Capital, and take this to a studio. It will cost me, but I think the end result, done and in my hands same day, will be worth it.
So much for the audio. NYU requires video as well. Last Wednesday I spent an entire day trying to find a video camera, and then once it was found, testing it to see if drums would clip, and finally plugging it in to all manner of cables and machines to determine how to extract video. Last night I stayed awake as my friend Paul rendered video from my first session from 11 until 4:30 AM.
So but now it’s worked out, I think. The session is at Relay Recording tomorrow at 1. After that, I’m slamming them into envelopes, hoping I can find that post office that I heard stays open late, and overnighting them out of here. It’s all incredibly stressful and last minute, but I hope that doesn’t affect any musical chemistry that we might conjure up tomorrow.
The final update on this process will come tomorrow, and you won’t hear about this again until I do, sometime around April first. Hooray waiting.
