Hello friends -- here is an update on the recording of my record:

Last week I spent three 9-hour days in the recording studio on my album. I made a huge amount of progress, and was feeling very positive about how it was going, and excited to keep working on it.

At the end of the week, I went to pick up my gear and hard drive, and before I left, went to make backup copies of the project files. An older copy of the files was on my hard drive "Instruments", and in order to make room for the updated versions, I deleted the old versions. The drive where all the projects were recorded is called "Benjamin" -- I deleted files from Instruments to make room for the updated files from Benjamin.

As Murphy's law would dictate, as soon as I emptied the trash on Instruments and started to copy the updated files over, Benjamin suffered a catastrophic drive failure, and the files were lost. The engineers at Glyph attempted to recover that drive, but there was such a horrible failure that the data was unrecoverable.

So, the next step was to try to "un-delete" the older versions of the files from "Instruments." Glyph was able to recover files, and for a fleeting moment, I thought I was back in action. Sadly though, on closer inspection it turns out that a significant enough number of the files were missing or damaged that no single song is likely to be usable. I am going to meet up with Alex from the studio next week to see what (if anything) is salvageable.

Fortunately, I have all three drum parts totally intact. That is the one instrument that I truly could not have done in my home studio. I'm at a point where I may need to do the majority of the album myself at home, as I have already used almost all of my budget in the studio. What I have left would be reserved for mastering and duplication of the CD when it's done.

So, it's a little unclear what happens next - I am really trying not to despair, as one way or another, I am going to have a record - let's hope that malevolent fortune is sufficiently satiated for now...

Benj