Here’s a list of the artists I saw:

• Sunpie Barnes and the Louisiana Sunspots
• Steve Martin with the Steep Canyon Rangers
• Soul Rebels
• Widespread Panic
• Blues Traveler
• Buckwheat Zydeco
• The Dixie Cups
• The Subdudes
• Hadley J Castille Family and the Sharecroppers Cajun Band
• Allen Toussaint
• Earth Wind & Fire
• Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi Band
• Shamarr Allen and the Underdawgs
• New Leviathan Oriental Foxtrot Orchestra
• Rebirth Brass Band
• Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band
• Jamil Sharif
• Chubby Carrier and the Bayou Swamp Band
• Pinstripe Brass Band
• Gregg Stafford and the Young Tuxedo Jazz Band
• Driskill Mountain Boys
• Sonny Landreth
• Sugarfoot’s Ohio Players
• Pearl Jam
• Jeff Beck
• Dukes of Dixieland
• Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue
• Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue
• Margie Perez
• Tim Laughlin
• Feufollet
• Van Morrison
• The Dead Weather
• Clarence Carter
• Ellis Marsalis
• Jimmy Johnson featuring the Dave Specter Band
• Luther Kent
• The Preservation Hallstar Revue
• The Radiators
• B.B. King

Pictures and more to come.

It’s been an incredible trip. We’ve heard some incredible music. Tonight, we’ll be hearing B. B. King. I actually shot an entire roll of Tri X 400. Which means I have to pick up a fresh jug of fixer when I get home. Look for pictures this weekend.

Being one of those work from anywhere freelancers is a blessing and a curse. I avoid the soul crushing drudgery of office life. The downside is, I never really get away from the office. So here in a hotel in New Orleans, I have set up a mini production suite. The Jazz Fest doesn’t really get underway until tomorrow, so I have at least a few hours to get some work done.

Tomorrow, a friend and I are setting off by car to The Big Easy for the 2010 Jazz Festival. Neither of us have been to New Orleans, but from what I hear, this should be a pretty epic trip. It is my intention to document our adventures here, but I make no promises.

Enough procrastinating, time to finish packing.

Many times, those who pine for the good old days never actually lived through them. Case in point, recording to analog tape. Analog tape recorders might as well be magical artifacts. It’s amazing that they even work at all, let alone that anybody actually used them. Let’s look at the real process of analog recording:

Before you can even begin recording, you must first clean the tape heads, rollers, capstan, and guides. Next you must demagnetize the heads, capstan, and guides. Then comes head alignment. Don’t forget to adjust the speed using test tones printed on tape. If you are very good at this process, you can get it done in about 45 minutes to an hour. The reality is, most people didn’t do this, or at least didn’t do it often enough. My mentor spent many years setting up and maintaining tape decks in the Washington D.C. area, because engineers were either too lazy or didn’t know how to do it themselves.

Oh yeah, don’t forget about record levels and such… there’s another 20-30 minutes gone.

Then there is the medium itself. Analog tape. It’s inconvenient. It’s heavy. It’s expensive. Right now, a reel of two inch tape costs $289.

And then there’s editing. I’ve never edited analog tape. However, I’ve been working on a tape restoration project, and have had to re-do a number of tape splices. So I’ve been introduced to razor blades and sticky tape. Let me say this, I’ll take Pro Tools any day over analog editing.

All this is to say, there is a reason digital recording took off, even though the early digital technology was terrible. People stuck with it because it was so much easier to work with than analog. Analog tape, when properly set up, has a certain sound that is magical. But is that sound worth the time and expense of dealing with tape? No. And with creative use of plug ins, one can recreate that analog sound quite faithfully.

I have seen engineers running a recording session where the file name at the top of the software window is still “Untiled.” This is bad. In one instance, they had reached the end of a 3 hour voice over session, and they hadn’t saved once! If the computer crashed, or the power went out, or somebody tripped over the power cord, POOF the audio would be gone.

In Pro Tools (my DAW of choice), there is a particular error that can prevent you from saving your work. This error manifests itself when Pro Tools starts up, but does not give any indication that is has occurred until you try to save your work. It is essentially a file corruption, but since it doesn’t affect the operation of the software until you try to save, it is the bane of many engineers. Imagine you’ve just finished a 5 hour tracking session with a band -they’re paying you- and you go to save your work and get a message that states “The operation could not be completed.” You may be able to recover the audio files, you may not. Or consider this, your mixing a project, and have been at it for several hours, and you hit save… “The operation could not be completed.” All that time, wasted.

There is an easy way to protect yourself from these disasters. SAVE EARLY and SAVE OFTEN! Make saving a habit. Every time you hit stop, hit Apple-S (keyboard shortcut for saving on macs). Every time you get up to take a break, save. Every time you make an edit, save. You get the idea. Don’t work on a project named “Untitled.” Name it, and save it, first thing.

The Pro Tools error I mentioned above is easy to detect: When you create a new session or open an existing one, move the mouse, and save. Pro Tools records the location of the mouse when it saves, so you have to move it so that it will have something to save. If you get the “Operation could not be completed” message, you know you have a problem that needs to be addressed before you start working.

Many software applications have the ability to automatically save at timed intervals. This is a very good thing to have turned on. I have Pro Tools set up to save a backup copy every 10 minutes, and to keep the previous 10 copies. If Pro Tools crashes, I only lose at most, 10 minutes of work.

One final suggestion: make use of the “save as” command. Save as is very powerful, because it gives you a lot of flexibility. Say I’ve been working on a mix, and decide I want to go in a different direction. I use the save as command to keep what I’ve been working on separate from the wild idea I want to try out. Another place where save as is really handy is when you work on a project over multiple days. Each day, when you open the project, use save as, and append the date to the file name. That way, you can easily go back to an earlier version of the project if you (or the client) so desires.