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(Day 1 is back here)

Tuesday morning I was cleaning up the session files, removing some of the track plaque in preparation for making my final backup and rough mix. I’ll repeat that: deleting files before making a backup. Can you see where this story is going? I’ll cut to the cut: instead of erasing two aborted overdub attempts, I speed-clicked through too many confirmation dialogs and wiped out the kick drum track for two verses, a chorus, and the big drum fill I’d spent hours recording the night before.

And then I panicked. I felt a wave of full-body anxiety that caused me to jump out of my seat and wrench my Etymotic earphones out of my ears so violently that the plastic earbud of one of them stayed behind, wedged in my ear canal like a cork. This was the extreme low point in the recording process, a disaster entirely born of my own haste and mindlessness: not like getting into a minor car wreck, but like getting into a minor car wreck in a friend’s 700-series because you’re trying to beat a new Corvette off the line. Not like a bad haircut, but like a bad haircut on your wedding day from the cousin in cosmetology school. Not like dropping dinner on the floor, but like dropping the baby on the floor. Well, maybe not that bad, but still.

I’d seen it coming, existentially speaking. Andrew had suffered a system crash that wiped out tons of data. Steve had come down with a headcold that threatened his ability to sing. It was simply my turn. Bad things come in threes, they say: I was born, I grew up, and you know the rest.

After remembering to breathe, and having my wife extract the remaining piece of my headphones from my skull, I looked into un-delete software for OS X. There is only one such product, and it failed. I was a bitter, bitter man.

I checked my backups and was much relieved to discover that I did have backups for the verses and chorus. I regained a modicum of perspective: OK, so I’d have to retrack the previous evening’s overdubs. That’s a loss, but not a terrible one.

I restored the deleted tracks and played back the result. “Why does the snare drum on these tracks sound so different?” I thought. I had heard the difference before; all the song sections recorded in the B set of inputs had a different snare sound. Realization hit me like a raw fish to the forehead: I had no overhead mics in the B set of inputs; instead, I’d recorded a duplicate of the stereo toms track. The snare sounded different because 75% of the snare sound comes from the overheads, which I hadn’t recorded because I hadn’t double-checked my input assignments. So much for my backups.

Re-tracking all the affected sections only took an hour. My adrenals were working overtime. And finally I re-recorded the overdubs, achieving not perfection but something close enough for rock and roll.

Ode to Soup (final drums, final bass, scratch dulcimer, no guitar, rough mix with some compression and EQ) (Copyright © 2004 matthew mcglynn)

And then I stayed up half the night tearing down the drumkit, packing away acoustic foam, and stowing cage parts in the garage, assisted throughout by my outrageously patient, incredibly supportive, and hugely pregnant wife. Steve (he’s the guitarist, not the baby) would arrive in 18 hours.