Have you ever heard of the Good-Fast-Cheap triangle? Well, you should know about it.

Draw a triangle and write one of the words; Good, Fast, and Cheap, at each point. You can choose any two, but you can not have the third one. If you want your album to be Fast and Good, it won’t be Cheap. If you desire Cheap and Good, it can’t be done Fast. If the record company wants it Fast and Cheap, it can’t be Good. The project I am currently working on requires a look at this triangle every day. Record, overdub, sweeten, mix and master 36 songs by 20 different artists working in three different countries and get it done in six weeks with no days off. (Travel days to different countries counting as days off falls in the same category as declaring catsup a vegetable.)

Latin World Entertainment
I guess I can talk about it now, because it will be done by the time you read this. I am engineering a project that is being produced by Don Grusin and Frank Quintero. A mix of contemporary and ethnic Latin music recorded by artists from all over Latin America. The U.S. portion of the recording was done in Los Angeles at Cherokee Studios on a Sony 48 track digital machine. The tracking band consisted of Alex Acuna on drums and percussion, Abraham Laboriel on bass, Oscar Castro-Neves on acoustic guitar, Ramon Stagnaro on electric and acoustic guitar, Don Grusin on keyboards, with various artists joining in for vocals, solos, and signature accompaniment by such notables as Sheila E.

After seven days of recording in LA, we jumped on a plane (our day off) to Caracas, Venezuela. Our trusty tracking band came with us. We recorded at a studio called Ingenio Musical. There was no 48-track digital in Caracas, so we recorded on a flock of ADAT XT machines. Some of the songs we recorded in LA were digitally transferred to ADAT so we could do overdubs in Caracas. Most of the ADATs in Caracas had over 5,000 hours on them. One of the XTs had pegged the hour meter at 9,999 hours. Kind of like driving your car for six months after the "Check Engine" light comes on. The tapes played back perfectly after returning to LA.

One of the best things I ever did was buy BASF pre-formatted blank ADAT tapes in LA, instead of spending hours formatting tapes on unknown machines. (I did finally have to format some blank tapes after I ran out of BASF, but that is just between you and me.) The console in Caracas was a 48 input Amek Mozart. The 46’ by 24’ studio with 20’ ceilings worked great, and we got a lot of recording done in six days.

Besides the LA All-Star Tracking Band, local musicians came in to record about half of the songs. A drummer named Andreas Briceno was great. Andreas brought his 10-year-old daughter to the studio one day. We heard her practicing trumpet in the lounge. She was so good we got her to play trumpet on one of the songs. Ensamble Gurrufio was one of the most amazing collection of musicians I have ever seen. You’ll have to hear this! They flew Bela Fleck in from Nashville to play with them for the recordings. I told Bela that we were going to have to stop meeting like this.

It was time for a day off, so we flew to Havana Cuba to do some more recording. The Cuba part of the trip was only four days, but the experience could fill a whole book. We recorded at Abdala studios. Abdala took two years to build and has been operational for about one year. Abdala has two studios and a MIDI room. Both main rooms contain SSL 4000G+ consoles. One studio has a large recording room with five isolation rooms. Abdala had a Studer 48 track digital machine, a rack of ADAT XTs, and a rack of DA-88s to cover all possible situations. We recorded some new songs on the 48 track, and did some overdubbing on the ADATs we recorded in Caracas. Abdala is one of the best sounding rooms I have ever recorded in. The control room sounded great and everything worked like a brand new studio. (Wait! It IS a brand new studio!)

In Havana there is not enough electricity to go around. About four million people inhabit the city itself. There are rolling blackout periods where each section of town takes its turn doing without electricity for a few hours so that the hotels full of tourists won’t have to do without. Because the power grid is on the ragged edge, thunderstorms easily cause numerous outages during any given day. Abdala has an extensive battery backup system augmented by a diesel generator the size of my Dodge van. The console, tape machines, outboard gear, and everything except the lights is always floating on the batteries. If there is a power blackout, the recording process doesn’t even burp. The batteries and inverters hold the load while the generator kicks in automatically. The only way you know anything happened is by the switchover to emergency lighting. Cool.

If you love old cars, Havana is the place. I didn’t see any American cars newer than 1959. There were thousands of ’49 to ’58 Chevys and Fords, some ‘50s Pontiacs, and tons of ’57 Chevys. They can’t get parts, so some engenious guys are manufacturing new parts from scratch to keep these cars going. I haven’t been in a ’59 Ford taxi since… well, 1959!

Back in LA it was time to finish any recording tasks and get all of the tunes ready to mix. I brought my Pro Tools for flying chorus vocals around. Nobody sings all of the choruses any more. It has been years. "Just sing one chorus and then we will fly it around." If a producer says that to you, make sure he doesn’t forget about the key change at the end (rap artists can disregard this sentence).

After all of the ADAT tracks and 48-track stuff was massaged in Pro Tools, everything was dumped to a Sony 48 track master reel to turn in to the record company. What are they going to do with all of those ADAT tapes? Well, maybe I will erase all 100 of them and use them for my daughter’s new band. Maybe I’ll leave some of the percussion, and drums, and loop part of the bass lines, and I think there was a couple of cool guitar licks and background "ooos"… naw, I better hit the red button before I get in trouble.

Oh, yeah. We are going to try to mix on the Otari Advanta digital console. I’ll keep you posted on that one.