Oh, yes. I had mentioned earlier that the Consort was getting together to evaluate the recordings we'd done for the second CD. Well, during the New Year's party, we broke away for a little while and gave ourselves a listen. I'm happy to say that we decided to keep two of the sixteen songs, trash some of them completely, and re-record the rest.

"Happy?" Why, yes. To begin with, I played a sample of guitar music I'd recorded using one of the cheap dynamic microphones we had used to record the songs, and then I played another sample made with one my new condenser mics.¹ The difference between the two was astonishing; whereas the first one was fairly tinny and hollow-sounding, the second one was fuller, richer and very warm. So some of the pieces which suffered from inadequate microphone response curves will be done again, which makes me happy.

Another reason for re-recording is that preparing for live gigs and a radio appearance really tightened up our sound. The stuff we'd recorded lacked a lot of the energy of our more recent performances, so we decided to do them again. Even so, they were still several orders of magnitude better than our first CD, which suffered from dirgelike tempos, among other technical handicaps.

But that latter fact moved us to trash some of the songs altogether; they'd been on our first CD, and while we didn't want our second one to be a re-recording of the first one, we had wanted to redeem ourselves by proving we could do them better. Well, we did prove it, so now we can throw them away and move on. A couple of the re-done songs will probably appear on the new CD, but I think they'll be worthwhile.

I can't wait until we get back to recording. The new gear's arrived, my upgraded computer hardware and software are working like a dream, and our recent performances sounded far better than I ever dreamed they would.

And then? Maybe a side project with Sev to do some jazz; I've got a sax that deserves to be more than a dust magnet.

1. Incidentally, I found out why the Oktava mics are going so cheap at Guitar Center. According to the microphone salesman, Mars Music had signed a deal with Oktava to be the exclusive American suppliers of their microphones, and bought boatloads of them. When Mars went under, Guitar Center snapped them up for practically nothing, so even at way below list price they're still making a hefty profit on them.