No, not the magazine this time. :)

I'm sitting in my basement having a conversation across 25 years of time as I work on what (I fervently hope) will be my last time around at remixing The Grim Roper. And it's a little bit strange.

The tracks that I'm working with were originally recorded on 8-track reel-to-reel tape back in 1987. Some years ago, I played them back on an old reel-to-reel that I no longer have and recorded them digitally on ADAT tape at a 48 KHz sampling rate. And the level of the recording was way too low.

Then I played the ADAT tracks back and recorded them onto my computer using Cubase. Although the levels were low, so were the noise levels, so Cubase could easily renormalize the tracks so that I had enough signal to work with and avoid annoying levels of background noise.

I'm loading up the last pass I made at the project, where I was mixing on the d8b, fixing the glitches that the latest Cubase upgrade introduced -- which in most cases means I need to import the WAV files into each project file again, renormalize them, and then reapply the processing. And then I'm mixing directly in Cubase, using the d8b as a glorified patch bay and D/A converter for monitoring.

"So, 25-year-ago me. I bet you couldn't have imagined that I'd be sitting here doing this today."

"I don't know. I can imagine an awful lot."

"Yeah, right."

"By the way, who's that shouting and jumping around upstairs?"

"You couldn't possibly imagine."

I think I'll go upstairs and see what Katie and Julie are up to... :)