I am writing from Windhoek now. I'm staying at the ELCN(Evangelical Lutheran Church of Namibia) guest house, which is a few blocks from the Bible Society offices. An LBT missionary was mugged and stabbed not too long ago in those few blocks between the guest house and office, so I am taking care to only make the trip during the office hours of the heavily-armed neighborhood security guards.
When I last wrote, I was finishing work on the recording of the Naro Choir. Those who are on the email prayer update list received an email on Saturday, as we prepared to finalize the tracks for the recording. I've been pretty busy since then, so I haven't been able to update anything.
The Naro Choir recorded a total of 22 songs over the course of three sessions. The total tracks amounted to about 70 minutes of music. A decision was made at the meeting to put the same program onto both CDs and cassettes, which would mean cutting the content to 60 minutes or less (the length of the cassette). I recommended cutting two of the songs whose performance was not up to the standard of the other tracks. One of the SIL missionaries recommended cutting some of the songs which were represented on an earlier recording by the choir. The choir representatives agreed with most of these suggestions, but wanted to rerecord two songs with subpar performances, including one of the ones I'd recommended for cutting. They agreed with me that the other subpar song should be put off for a later recording date--it was still a fairly new song to them. They had two other songs they wanted to redo as well, but eventually decided to only redo one of them.
This meant a Saturday evening recording session. So, instead of beginning the mastering process in the afternoon, I really couldn't start until after supper, and then with two new songs to edit.
Mastering an album is very much an art and a difficult thing to explain. It's like, I had all 18 tracks and needed to use compression, EQ, and fading subtly to make everything sound like it belonged together. A decision has to be made as to how much space is placed between the songs. The challenge, really, was to keep it all sounding subtle. This wasn't a pop recording, but one which needed to sound as natural and real... while still sounding very professional... as possible. And because a completed CD and cassette master needed to be turned in before I left town the next morning, I didn't have much margin for error.
The process went fairly smoothly. And I'm very pleased to report my computer--which had been giving me about five minutes to an hour between crashes, did not crash the whole evening. I started buring the first master CD at 11:00. After I finished that, I started buring a data CD (containing mono files for the cassette master and other documents for the archives). Meanwhile, Kedra duplicated the master CD. While I burned a second data disc, she started dubbing the cassette master. While time consuming, the whole process went pretty smoothly. I was in bed a little bit after 1:00 in the morning.
Kedra and I flew to Windhoek, Namibia on Sunday. On Monday, I took the computer into the local Apple store where (due to Murphy's Law of Computer Repair), the problem could not be replicated. I was ready to call my computer miraculously healed. I wouldn't be the
first time God had intervened on behalf of technology. But that evening, things were back to their usual crash-every-few-minutes self. Anyway, all this week, I'll be involved in administering a survey of media use amongst a local people group here. I have more to say about that, but I'll put that off until a later entry.
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