Invisible Scenes

[I might add that the producer goes through a similar purgatory which must necessarily be combined with the musician's limbo to produce the relative nirvana of a recording, and so I have written my own (as always) slavishly imitative codicil to his above litany, like a small child pensively toddling behind a somber Viennese professor. -- The Producer]

And then there's the technology. Your friends hate you the first day you get your crummy Norelco tape recorder with its plastic pseudo-rattan case and don't immediately record them. Don't those people make razors, they snort.

    A decade later, the Norelco turns into a Tandberg reel-to-reel recorder, whose transport breaks all the time, slinging tape around the room like confetti. You can't afford a Nagra, which is only used by government spies. Reel-to-reel tape morphs to digital audio tape, which is the same thing as tape, but smaller, impossible to cut with a razor to get rid of mistakes, and it doesn't sound as good. But it is cutting edge. Tape disappears and is replaced by digits and hard drives, things which are even harder to understand, but which are reassuringly expensive.

    Finally, everything comes together: the tuner has left, the piano has gone out of tune instantly, at which point you find you admire antiquated forms of non-tuning. The birds have stopped fighting, the stream is quiet, the wind behaves, the airport under whose flight path the studio sits has closed for the night. After eras of errors, you've found a great spot for the mics. Every piece of recording equipment you own has been instantly outmoded. And now there's a fly on the mic.