WOW what a day!

I learned an important lesson about sample rates yesterday! (Huh?)

Chad's guitar track somehow ended up in the wrong key! At first I panicked a little, thinking he'd have to re-record the whole thing. That's not like saying, "Can you make me another cup of coffee?" That's like saying "Can you paint me a new painting, I lost the last one."

But he is more experienced in Protools than me (my music studio program) and he said, "Check your sample rate."

Huh?

Luckily, I had an engineering tutoring course yesterday with my Protools guru Mike. He explained that sample rates have to match, and a CD has a standard 44.1 k sample rate (which Chad recorded at.) I was set at 48 (my protools default.) So I switched it up and voila! The guitar was perfect! By the way, a sample rate is how many times per second digital sound is sampled. Kind of like how many times per second a picture is taken to make a movie. The more pictures per second, the less choppy the movie, or in my case, the song.

Then I said, "Mike, my tracks aren't sizzling. In my old studio I used to have a thing called a sonic maximizer that just made vocals shimmer!"
He smiled like he had just baked me a birthday cake and said, "Maxim." He pushed a little button I'd never discovered before, and voila! Shimmers like the wind tinkling the leaves of an aspen tree! Aaaaaaah, SWEET!
Sorry if I'm getting all techy geeky but I'm a baby in the studio trying to do a grown up thing like mastering a CD so I have to do it right, and I'm all happy when I learn something really important AND cool at the same time.

THEN, off I went to do the CD graphics wih my daughter Shannon. She is a wizard! her fingers flew, she had really creative ideas, and my favorite part was when I said, "I want the font to be fun. I have no idea what that means but it has to be fun."

She smiled as if she actually understood, pulled up about ten fonts. Then I jumped. "There it is!" It was all curly and swirly and... FUN! How did she do that?

Then, with a couple hours left before work, I stopped by the hospital to check on Kathy, who was in labor. And what a wonderful, wonderul surprise-- she was delivering as I arrived! Kylie is gorgeous, perfect, healthy, and has the happiest parents in the world!!

I just couldn't get myself to leave, so I joyfully manned the video camera. Soon the rest of the gang arrived. I stayed til the last split second, skipped a shower and just threw on some lipstick and went to work, high on baby love.