Recall Stitch

How do you manage recall? I mean, the short answer is I don’t. Can I respond to this from the beach?

Yeah, screw it. Why not? So one of my favorite things about working with analog gear isn’t just the way it sounds, which can be great, also can be a problem.

It’s the workflow stuff. I keep seeing posts about this and it’s all correct. It forces you to commit to something.

I mean, I think that’s a really good thing. But there’s something else at play, which is the time and the amount of reflection that goes into dealing with analog. For example, when you’re working with tape and you finish a tape, you don’t get to hear it immediately.

You got to stop. You got to rewind and you got to play. And that 10, 15, 20 seconds is going to change your perception of what you did.

When you have to recall a mix in analog and redo all your patches and reset your compressor,, that compressor is not going to sound the same Thursday than it did on Monday. And you’re not going to get the settings exactly the same no matter what you do. And it forces you to stop and evaluate those choices and listen again with fresh ears.

And that’s a good thing. The beauty of it is that you don’t actually need to work in analog to experience those features. You can literally just slow yourself down, take time, reflect, commit.

And I promised everybody a hack for recalling analog sessions. And so I’ll give that to you now. And it is this.

At the end of the tape, I always used to leave some whatever the opposite of leader is, I guess it’s a tale. And on that, I would speak into the microphone as I zeroed out the board and I zeroed out all of my equipment., this fader was at,, two and now it’s going to zero. This knob was at 11 o’clock.

Now it’s going back to 12 o’clock. As you reset everything in your studio, as you pull those patches, you say it out loud. And when it’s time to pull up that session again, you just play that tape and you do everything that it says.

I don’t know that there’s a lot of use for that anymore. But as somebody who loves process, I thought I’d show that.