Digital is so much easier.

[tfabris]

So we're in Jeff Bohnhoff's legendary Mystic Fig studios this weekend, with cadhla, harmonyheifer and it_aint_easy, recording tracks for the Bohnhoff's next parody album. Jeff and Maya, you see, alternate between doing serious albums and parody albums, and we're on the parody side of the clock this year. Jeff's already going to Hell for parodying Stairway and Smoke on the Water, so now he's just digging himself deeper with a Bohemian Rhapsody parody.

It's funny how things always come full circle. The original recording contained 180 separate overdubs for its operatic bridge, causing technical problems because of the excessive number of bounce-downs required. A bounce is when you take several finished tracks from a recording and permanently combine them into a single track, so that you free up more tracks on the tape machine for recording more parts. This is a perfectly valid way to work, but it means you can never go back and edit just one of the bounced parts; you've got to be absolutely sure those tracks are perfect before you start the bounce. Queen worked on a very-modern-for-its-time 24-track system, and the most modern tape-based recording systems can do 48, 96, or more tracks before you need to start bouncing.

You'd think that computer recording technology would solve this, and it does... kinda. Modern recording software allows virtually unlimited tracks, but it introduces problems of its own. We're only about half done with the tracking on this thing, and Jeff's top-of-the-line computer is already breaking under the stress, occasionally running out of memory and crashing when we add another track. I've never actually seen a computer-based recording project so large that it actually needed bounce-downs, but I'm wondering if Jeff's actually going to need to resort to that ancient technique just to keep the project file running.

Other than that, the session is going well, the song is hilarious, we're all having a huge amount of fun, and it's an absolute kick to hear the results played back; it sounds amazing.

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