Friday in Santa Fe

02010-03-26 | Photos | 7 comments

The annual Spring winds have started. They lent my day in studio Oto-Mare a dramatic backdrop. The sky kept changing from sunshine to clouds, from Santa Fe’s dazzling light to darkness and back, and there was a certain smell in the air. I guess I would call it a storm smell, although the weather sites are switching back and forth on whether there will be a lot of wind tonight or even another snowstorm. Life on a mountain. Our weather is unpredictable.

The studio looks darker than usual, because I close the four skylights when I am mixing and mastering an album. The shafts of the skylights can trap low frequencies and diminish the accuracy of what I hear. With a long pole I can close doors located at the bottom of the light-shafts.

I worked on CD mixes (16/44.1 with my usual compression – the same I have used since “La Semana”) and HD mixes (24/88.2 and no compression). My day ended up longer than expected, but I enjoyed it.

Today I spent nine hours in the studio. Most of the time I don’t sit on the Aeron chair you can see on the left.

Instead I sit on a stool I bought about ten or twelve years ago at MoMA. Its height can be adjusted and the bottom looks like this:

The chair forces me to keep both feet on the floor and sit straight, because otherwise it will wobble.

While I am running off mixes I have time to do other things. Some of the songs on the new album are more than seven minutes long. So, instead of sitting in front of the console the whole time, I’ll walk around, play air-guitar, dance like an idiot, or today I did pushups. I did a hundred and discovered that pushups are less of a strain on my wrist if I do them Bruce Lee style – on my fingertips. Did half of them in this way and my wrists didn’t creak once.

The release date of the album will probably be sometime in the second half of June, but, if all goes well, we may have CDs for sale on tour in May. They won’t be in stores until the 22nd or 29th of June though.

7 Comments

  1. steve

    Your studio looks like a calming environment. I’m envious.

    Reply
  2. Matt Callahan

    “in stores” makes me stop and think. The last CD I bought in a brick and mortar store was Winter Rose back when it was released.

    Reply
  3. Brenda

    Wind of your spring storms will be heard beautfully in stores soon, and our visions of the Virtuoso’s fingertips of “Life on a Mountain”, will be heard by all.

    Reply
  4. steve

    These pictures are great: will they ever be on Flickr?

    Reply
  5. Panj

    How beautifully said Brenda! And how delightful, picturing Ottmar dancing like crazy around the studio..:-)

    Reply

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