Technology is great. But only if you have the right adapter.

You've heard the word snafu. Although, you probably know this, snafu is an acronym for situation normal all fucked up. Throughout the making of my album, I can honestly say that I have not had many snafus. No, mostly things have gone right, and when they have not, a fix has been quickly found. Not yesterday.

There we were, me and Sam Bevan, all set to track Sam’s bass to a song called The Road Back. I handed Sam my trusty AKG headphones and then grabbed my cheap Sony’s ‘phones, so I could listen and offer feedback on Sam’s playing. Shazbot! The Sony’s needed an adapter to plug into my Pro Tools box. Calmly, I looked in the place I normally keep the adapter and it wasn’t there. No problem, I figured, I have more! So I looked in the place where I keep all my adapters. No dice. Well, I’ll just assemble one, I figured, using various other adapters. I mean, all I needed was to go from the 1/8” inch headphone plug to the ¼” Pro Tools jack. Surely, I had what I needed. But I did not. Another frantic search ensued yielding… nada. There was no time to go buy the needed adapter, as we only had about 90 minutes for our session, so there we sat, equipped with two basses, a direct box for tone, a Digidesign MBox 2 Pro, a MacBook Pro, a whopper of a hard drive, studio monitor speakers (which I haven’t figured out how to connect to Pro Tools yet), a 23-inch monitor, software plug-ins galore, a Shure microphone, two pairs of headphones and more cables than would be comical and yet we could not have an effective session, because we could not both hear Sam’s during tracking or playback.

We made the best of it, but did not get the final track. Sigh. In adland, there’s a famous IBM spot that ends with the punch line, “You need an adapter.” Truer words have rarely been spoken.