Roseville Big Band CD Timeline

CD Timeline

These are some of the events and director Glen Newton's work efforts that went into the Roseville Big Band's recording, "Concert in the Park".

January 29-31, 1998	Set recording date (and before that, deciding which songs to put on the album); Carl and Doc not able to be there, but Dan covers Doc's part; no guitar sub in sight so decided to do it without a guitar
February 17, 1998	Recorded the CD songs at a rehearsal, to listen for potential improvement and practice keeping quiet after the song ends
February 19, 1998	Photocopied scores for the engineer and producer
February 24, 1998	Rehearsal
March 3, 1998	20 hours revising arrangement of "My Little Girl"
March 7, 1998	3.5 more hours on MLG score and extracting and printing parts
March 10, 1998	Rehearsal
March 17, 1998	Rehearsal (Mark gone; mother ill); turned in payment paperwork for Studio M to Parks and Rec
March 18, 1998	Mark's mother died last night
March 21, 1998 (Saturday)	First recording session; 11 songs; GN played Mark's parts and directed from the trumpet section
March 22, 1998	Band ended around 1:45, after recording "Woodchopper's Ball" twice and "Rock Around the Clock" twice; stayed until 5:10 doing overdubs, including the vocals, "Star Dust," and Rich on "Rosie the Riveter" and (with me on trombone) the key change of "Sleepy Time Gal."
March 28, 1998 (Saturday)	Long overdub session; Mark on "Waltzing Matilda", "Star Dust", etc.; RATC piano triplets
March 30, 1998	Worked out soprano trombone part to WCB to fill in the gap left by Mike and Keith, because Mike's flight schedule didn't really allow time for him to overdub
April 2, 1998	Wrote rough draft of CD liner notes, including getting quote from Mark Lammers
April 4, 1998 (Saturday)	Mixdown notes ready, after listening to the rough mixes many hours
April 7, 1998	Bob brings three pieces of Gretchen's art to consider for the booklet; called Harry Fox Agency about song clearances
April 8, 1998	Research on CD and cassette duplicators
April 11, 1998 (Saturday)	Mixed SD, WCB, RATC, RTR, SLM, GOMM 9 AM to 7 PM; Steve Wright there from 10-1; changed to GN as producer and Steve W as consultant; overdubbed soprano trombone on WCB, and second half of GN solo on STG (wrong mouthpiece - hard to match tones), and tenor sax on WCB
April 12, 1998	Revised liner notes
April 18, 1998 (Saturday)	More mixdown; Karen overdub; fixed another note in trombones on Star Dust
May 28, 1998	Mastering
June and July, 1998	Worked on cover art, photos for booklet, final text and layout for booklet, CD art; researched CD and tape duplicators
August 13, 1998	CD booklet and tray card went to press
August 18, 1998	Reprocessed booklets that were smudged
August 28, 1998	Resolved font problems (different versions of Park Avenue) for printing on the CD
September 1, 1998	Sent CD to California for duplication
September 29, 1998	Got first estimate on cost of 250 cassettes but rejected it - too high
October 7, 1998	Took materials to Precision Powerhouse for cassette duplication
October 15, 1998	Picked up approval copy of cassette, listened, and approved it.
October 21, 1998	Pursued distribution with OarFin; decided against it because of very low profit margin
October 30, 1998	Cassettes ready, missing the deadline for a dance where we hoped to have them, and with spacing problems in the J-cards
December 2, 1998 and January 13, 1999	Sent follow-up emails to Harry Fox Agency inquiring about our licenses. Got no reply.
March 24, 1999	Made follow-up phone to HFA about the licenses; the agent said he'd send them right out.
April 4, 1999	Signed and returned all but one of the licenses to HFA. The other was not yet available because they did not have a contract with the copyright holder to collect the mechanical royalties.
May, 1999	Received final license from HFA, the one for "Cha Cha Cha for Judy". We were the only ones other than the composer to record it.
Various dates	Other stuff - working out trb solo on RATC and trpt solo on STG; working with graphics, taking tapes to duplicator,proofing inserts (and finding a strange line break), driving to the park to take pictures, deciding on the order of songs for the CD and tape, deciding what to leave off the J-card; Studio M gave us a lower hourly rate as the project dragged on; following up on the excess shipping charges for the CDs ($200 vs. $99.20 estimate); final accounting; sending payment to HFA for first 500 copies

Glen comments:

If I had it to do over again, I'd do the following to raise the resulting recording's quality even higher:

Another take or two on my vibe solo for "My Little Girl," to get rid of the one damped note.
Redo start of "Moon River" vocal.
Redo start of "Georgia" vocal.
Redo introduction to MLG and have someone else kick it off. (My bass trombone sounded blatty, in part because I had to play immediately after giving the count-off.)
Put the piano into the mix at a point or very small spread - even less than I used; the engineers wanted to spread it across the whole left to right spectrum, but I reduced it considerably.
More difference in panning on brass hits on "Cha Cha Cha for Judy".
Redo my overdub of the tenor sax solo on WCB to get the high note to come out - stiffer reed, perhaps.

Procedurally, I'd make a few changes, too:

Listen more, talk less when mixing.
Allocate more channels for trombones, to be able to adjust volume of bass trombone, etc., better.
Talk to the engineer beforehand about making a non-linear recording (e.g., to Pro Tools); ours was "the last 2-inch tape recording they would make" but they might have been able to go directly to the computer, which would have given us a lot more flexibility for editing and mixdown.
Pay more attention to headphone mix - e.g., Dan and others couldn't hear the electric bass on "Woodchopper's Ball" - that's why he was off by a beat on his solo.
Pick a song other than "Waltzing Matilda" to warm up and set levels on; it was too taxing on my lip.
Make sure the engineer saved the first couple of takes of "Waltzing Matilda"; he didn't, and Kay felt that her best solos were on the ones they didn't save.
Help the engineer pay more attention to what was on the tracks, to avoid accidentally recording over some parts.
Don't get so many cassettes; they turned out to be not as popular as we had thought.
Don't wait so long to call the Harry Fox Agency to follow up.

This page was last updated
Friday, February 07, 2020.