Today Matt Cook and I had a very good recording session with the orchestra in Prague. Matt is working on an ambitious demo project and has written a lot of really interesting music. I’m orchestrating and doing score prep for him, but also coaching him a bit on orchestration. I’ll be doing the music mixes later on also.

Matt travelled to Prague for the session and I stayed in Los Angeles. In the past I have produced sessions both in person and remotely, but this was my first time co-producing a session when one of us was there and one of us was not. It took a bit of getting used to, but it worked well in the end.

The orchestra in Prague sounds really good. When I first used them perhaps 12-14 years ago they were notably weaker, and it took 4 hours there to accomplish what we could do in 3 in LA. They have closed that gap almost entirely, and at 60% the cost of LA or Nashville it’s unfortunately hard to justify keeping the money in our own local music economy.