[HeavyWeather77]

I've had the good fortune of contributing to a large number of remote collaborative recording sessions during this pandemic fiasco, but this is the first one that I'm aware of to make it onto the local news! KXAN in Austin gave a nice little chunk of air-time to my buddy Mike Sailors, a wonderful trumpet player and arranger, who wrote a great arrangement of "Rosetta" and recruited a bunch of his friends in Texas and New York to record the parts. He featured local guitar legend Rick McRae as well. Here's the news segment for anyone curious.

I got to be part of a phenomenal virtual saxophone section including Andrew Gould and Caleb Kurtis on altos, Steve Kortyka (of Lady Gaga/Tony Bennett fame) and myself on tenors, and Andrew Gutauskas on bari. Here's the arrangement and video to go along with it:

 

[skeller047]

Nice chart and nice playing!

 

[mi000ke]

Very cool! Could you share some info about the process? In what order did you lay the tracks down? Were they built up and passed around? And who did the great video editing work?

 

[GT]

Man, I like that. My big band doesn't sound like that when we're all in one room...

 

[HeavyWeather77]

Very cool! Could you share some info about the process? In what order did you lay the tracks down? Were they built up and passed around? And who did the great video editing work?

It was a pretty interesting process, for sure. Mike is a fantastic arranger so there was no question the chart was going to work, but the first things to get laid down were drums and lead trumpet. So Mike recorded the lead part to the drum track, then all the other horns recorded to Mike and drums as a reference point. I was actually pretty amazed that everything ended up sounding as locked-in as it did! Fortunately, everyone involved is an experienced pro and a good reader for big band music... and we can all record ourselves at home with professional results. This kind of thing wouldn't have been possible ten years ago, I don't think. We're all bedroom producers now, to a degree, and the pandemic only accelerated a trend that was already well on its way.

I think the video was edited by Mike's wife, who's also an awesome comedy writer!