Honey Bears + Sopapillas

Travel Tips. Santa Fe. Part One:

Maybe you have visited Santa Fe before? Maybe you have wondered why New Mexican restaurants often have little plastic honey bears on the tables? Well, one of the New Mexican specialties, something I have never seen down in Old Mexico, is the Sopapilla, which is really similar to Native American Fry Bread. And the honey is on the table so you can break the sopapilla open and squeeze some honey into the air pocket inside. It’s deep fried and probably not very healthy, but does it taste great!!

Modern Band Shells

Here is something that bugs me:

I read that artist Frank Stella and architects Frank Gehry and David Rockwell have recently designed band shells. A band shell is a contraption that hangs above the stage and is supposed to focus and project the sound of the acoustic, unamplified orchestra instruments into the audience. Stella said in an interview that since all performances are electronically enhanced today you don’t have to worry about acoustics. In other words, the band shell is becoming a very expensive, and rather useless piece of art instead of being an integral part of the music……

Hm, why have an orchestra play at all? Maybe they should just play a recording and do away with the uncertainty of a live performance……

Digital Masters

I thought of something last week while we were mixing and mastering my new album for Epic Records. Record Companies usually own their artists’ “Masters”, i.e. the multitrack tape that the recordings were made on. Well, there is no original master in the digital world! The actual original master is on the hard drive of the computer the music was recorded on. Then the file is backed up and the original is erased to make space for the next recording. From now on the artists and record companies both have identical copies of the music!

Christmas Album

We have finished our new Christmas Album for Epic Records, tentatively entitled “Christmas in Santa Fe”, to be released in Autumn of this year. I am very excited about the sound of this recording and very happy with the musical performances. Absolutely no Compression was used during the recording or mixing of this album. What you will hear on this CD is the pure sound of the instruments through a Neumann M149 microphone and a Martech microphone pre-amp into the ProTools system running at 24bit/48khz on a Macintosh computer.