March 11-16

These four days are dedicated to recording the next LAGQ album, tentatively entitled "LAGQ-Brazil". The studio is Skywalker Sound, a state of the art post-production facility, owned by Star Wars director George Lucas.

The grounds of Skywalker are gorgeous - I love Northern California! Rolling green hills, quiet country roads, and cushy digs...a sort-of deluxe camping experience.

The room we record in is an enormous, orchestral-size space. Our label, Telarc, specifically chose this room, for its acoustics and for its isolation. But, interestingly, although Skywalker features cutting edge technology, Telarc brings in its own recording technology. Telarc records with DSD (Digital Stream Digital), which is a completely different type of digital recording than the standard PCM (Pulse Code Modulation). The DSD sampling rate is 32 times greater than a 96kHz PCM sampling rate. DSD proponents say that it approaches analog recording's warmth.

The second day, understanding the start time to be 11, I rose lazily at 9:15, had a shower then settled in for a nice, leisurely breakfast. "Hey Matt, we're going up [to the studio]," called Erica Brenner, our producer. I immediately realized that I had spaced - the start time was 10, not 11. I scooped my things together and ran out. Upon getting the full story, John (who was my "housemate" that week and saw me taking my sweet time as I slowly got going that morning) laughed later and said, "I was impressed at first. I thought, man, this is one chill dude." Well, as it turned out, not quite that chill, John.

The actual playing was fun. But because some of the music posed technical challenges to our Telarc team (for instance, to use an isolation booth for the soprano saxophone or not?) the LAGQ task was to stay focused and ready to play when they were ready to "roll tape". After a few days of more music-making than speaking, I started to get into an interesting kind of zone where I was no longer as verbally cognizant as one usually is. I just felt like some sort of music animal, like my whole purpose was to do nothing but read, play, and listen to music. Trippy!