Sometimes, when trying to explain why this recording’s taken so long, even compared to the four years of the meadowlands, or saying that I've worked on this pretty much daily etc. etc., it all seems bonkers (and it is) or at least doesn’t make logical sense.
Because understandably, hearing that, you’d prob. picture an album of standard songs, prob. written in advance of recording, recorded normally (i.e. w/ a full band or even as most of these were, solo, one piece at a time), overdubbed some,maybe even a lot, maybe saved-as a few different ways/versions/mixes along the way etc…and for some of the songs, that’s sorta correct. But for most, the problem is that the scale is off a bit. How off?
Well without getting bogged down in the “why’s” of the amount of work, as Im finishing up, I’ve also been organizing all the recording back-ups from various hard drives and thought that this song would make a quick “holy crap!” video walk-through of just how much dumb donkey labor I’ve put into this thing (w/ a quick disclaimer that this is prob. the most outlying song on the album work-/file-size-wise, for a bunch of reasons, but many of the other songs are right up there).
And if understandably you don’t wanna watch me zoom through folders-within-folders in the clip, what sorta scale are we talking about?
For this song, welllll…about 240 gigabytes. Not a typo.
(again disclaimer: that includes duplicated audio files, i.e. a bass part say, that are common to subsequent versions. Still…that’s a lot of bass parts.)
To the finish..