In preparation for the Legally Blonde musical I’m playing bass in this November, the band has begun rehearsing together and hacking through the pieces to see what’s easy and what’s hard given the ensemble available. It is a much smaller group than the score envisages! We’ve been rehearsing in someone’s garage. Since the drummer is using an electronic kit, we’re able to each listen in on a headphone mix and, because it’s going through a digital desk, I’m able to grab each channel as a separate track into Logic Pro.

It’s been a long while since I’ve had the opportunity to do this and I was a bit concerned that the dear old Macbook might not cope but it seems to have been up to the job. I’ll need to ensure that I keep a reasonable amount of disk space free. It means that, in the next couple of days, I need to finish off a rough mix and there will be a bit of set up work next time. One of the instruments didn’t come through and I wonder if it was one of those I hadn’t assigned? I plugged in the first 16 and not all of those were used but perhaps the second keyboard ended up routed through one of the remaining 8 options.

It’s a start on capturing what we’re doing though and hopefully will be a tool to accelerate progress and get us to where we need to be.

Meanwhile, I’m finding that I’m actually rather enjoying the headphone experience. The Allen and Heath QU-SB desk we’re using allows us to control our own mix via a smartphone app so I can get enough of me and enough of everyone else without affecting the particular mix some one else in the group can hear. I think I’m looking forward to listening back in detail to my bass playing tomorrow so I can, ahem, learn from it!