To actually create the album, I had to deal with all my collected audio recordings. First I had to listen to more than a hundred tracks and eliminate those with irreparable shortcomings, i.e., recordings where the recording device got turned on late or turned off early, where there was too much noise or not enough vocal mic, where the balances were just totally out of whack, etc. Then I eliminated those performances which I considered sub par.
Secondly I invited some friends and colleagues to listen to a half dozen tracks which I considered marginal candidates for inclusion in the CD and asked them to write down comments and grade them relative to each other, or else I wrote down what they said to me directly about the tracks, creating a sort of floating focus group. I began to construct numerous imaginary CD track sequences on paper.
There was at least one instance in which two takes of the same piece were in competition and I had to listen to them repeatedly, trying to decide which one to use. This affected the order of the albut cuts, often because the introduction or “outro” for the piece would naturally lead into or out of another piece. We would eventually edit the speeches I made before and after pieces to perfectly suit their order on the final CD arrangement.
Once I had my semi-finalists selected I proceeded to make seven successive versions of the album at home on my cassette machine, using my CD masters. I invited a few friends to listen with me to the last few versions in order to judge our reactions to the ebb and flow of the potential CD.
I went into the studio for the mastering armed with exact editing cues gleaned from these numerous listening sessions, along with a lot of notes about places on the recordings which needed work. Having done so much organizing in advance saved money on studio time, I think. There were a couple of line fluffs we could eliminate entirely by simply editing them out of tracks which contained techno music which was fairly mechanical in its profile. One line fluff we left in because it almost sounded right and the rest of the recording was just too good. We had to edit out some applause because it was too long (!) and we added some applause from alternate takes to one medley we had cut into to extract a good recording of a single piece and a few places where the audience sounded dead. I had never had an extra audience mic rigged up in any of the venues and sometimes the crowd was a bit far away from the recording mic -- especially at a rock festival in the south of France where a catwalk and security guards and barricades were between us and the front rows. At one point we ran out of decent applause from my recordings and utilized some applause from my engineer Mango’s recording of his friend’s jazz band in a bar on Maui. We ended up using applause like a kind of glue or “hamburger helper” to get us smoothly from one piece to the next, but I don’t consider it cheating, as we ended up with about as much applause as was there in the first place. And oh yeah, it helps if you shape the thing like a show since it is a crazy quilt collection of excerpts of shows.
