Back at work, (pandemic-safely) mixing my new album

Although performances are still either cancelled or (occasionally) online, I’ve been thrilled to be able to re-start work on my current recording project: a group of pieces that I wrote for jazz quintet (Ingrid Jensen, Dayna Stephens, Allison Miller, Nick Moran, and me) and a 14-piece string orchestra. We performed and recorded the music back in February. Looking back, I am incredibly grateful that more than a year of work wasn’t derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, that we were able to present this music to a large and appreciative audience in Madison, and that we were able to record it before travel restrictions would have made that impossible.
While the music was recorded at the end of February, the next steps are editing, mixing, and mastering the recording. I worked with two great recording engineers, Audrey Martinovich and Buzz Kemper from Madison’s Audio for the Arts on a location recording from UW-Madison’s new Hamel Music Center, and now Audrey and I are picking the project back up, starting on mixing and editing. We’re able to do this super safely at Audio for the Arts’ studio, with Audrey in the control room, and me in the main recording room. We can see each other through the window from the control room, and hear each other through headphones and talkback mics, doing all of the work in real time and at top audio fidelity. This would not be possible through video conferencing, which even in the best scenario does not have adequate bandwidth for real-time studio-quality audio. It’s great to be back doing collaborative creative work, getting out of the house, and taking the next steps with this awesome project on which everyone played their butts off.