For the past four weeks I’ve worked on a monstrous project. I decided I wanted to digitize the old Pusher and EM recordings. These only exist on cassette tape. I pulled out my box o’ tapes and started going through them several weeks ago. I found 54 tapes. From that I gleaned over five hours of actual content from over seventy hours of tape (some were 60 minutes and some 90). The process was fairly laborious as I had the cassette deck on the floor and would have to reach down and press the fast forward, stop, and play buttons ad nauseum. Once I’d find a song I’d have to rewind to the beginning – listen for an audible cue – then rewind again and start recording into Ableton on that cue. It took over three weeks of working a few hours each day to churn out the content. I finished Saturday night. Then it was time to mix down in Ableton. I tried to EQ the sounds a bit to get rid of hiss and whatnot (bring down the bass when it was too loud and bring up the vocals, etc.). Since the recordings are from old (as in 1996) cassettes that were played over and over, I was not able to get rid of a fair amount of hiss. I mixed it all down yesterday. I then rendered WAV files and burnt them to (audio) discs. There are two for Pusher and two for EM –all 70 full minutes and I had to leave some songs off. I then converted all these songs to mp3 format with Audacity. Once in mp3 format I could put both EM and Pusher songs on one data disc as well as the lyric sheets that I scanned in years ago. I burned each disc five times so I could give each original member of Pusher a disc and also have a backup disc. So, if you’re keeping track that means I burned 25 discs.

All in all I’ve got 77 tracks now (31 EM, 46 Pusher). There are at least ten songs that I couldn’t find on any of the tapes which is sort of a bummer, but I found more EM material that I’d forgot about and wasn’t on the “album” Soothing.

To get away from the computer screen (but not from music) I’m going to the Queens of the Stone Age concert tonight with Aaron. Should be fun, but I’m not looking forward to being groggy all day tomorrow.