I remember the day clearly. It was when everything that I thought was fun about recording got turned on its head. Until that point I'd enjoyed mucking about with tape decks as a way to document my own ideas. Aside from labeling a cassette insert with a working song title after 4-tracking, I hadn't spent extra time taking notes about the tracks I'd recorded. Sure, I'd made records in studios, but someone else did the engineering and producing — I was just the bass player. I certainly didn't take very many notes. But here I was, sitting by a tiny window in my basement looking at one of my earliest paying clients knocking out a take, and I realized something important: I now had to start generating some paperwork and documenting my sessions. The honeymoon was over.
It became pretty obvious at that moment I now had a real job to do. No more would I simply sit and watch the musicians in the other room banging away on their instruments — now I would be expected to hunch over a clipboard and scribble notes onto specialized track sheets... or, at the very least, grab a Sharpie and write song titles and times on the back of a reel box. This wasn't fun. I thought recording music was supposed to be fun!