December 11, 2021 - Strings Recording

East West Studios. We were in a legit recording studio. A studio-studio recording studio.

Karen took contracting the strings session really seriously, landing Kathleen Robertson and Karenza Peacock as the first and second violins. I nabbed Maksim (of course) and asked Ethan Moffitt to come in to play. Chuck Fernandez took the stand.

Chuck Fernandez give notes to the string quintet he is conducting at the Strings Recording Session.

Lucas Fehring was busy, so we got to work with engineer Michael Stern. The list of films he has worked on was endless. Chuck knew him from before, so that helped. But let's be honest about it, when you take a gig recording junior high and high school musicians music, it's kinda just for the paycheck until... he heard the first bit of music.

Inception got a big fan and supporter that day. That guy was doing everything in his power to make the session go its best. It included building click tracks because someone (me) forgot the midi files. But he was also incredibly gracious and congratulated the composers who were in person on their work once they had finished. He wrote me an email later and told me he would be available for any session in the future which was incredibly unnecessary and nice.

Akira and Michael Stern sit at a large mixing board. Inception students Leo, Dante, Angela, and Christopher, all masked, sint on the couch behind them listening to the session.

Leo and Christopher had music recorded and were there in studio. Dante was still a part of Inception, working on electronic music with Jack. But he came to the session and was two feet taller than I imagined him to be on Zoom. And Angela join us as well.

Our other composers joined us on zoom. Samara hosted them. And Chuck just ran an absolute clinic on how to lead a session.

Lucas Fehring would engineer the post production for us, and our first all live recording set a new standard for what we were going to do.