Doin' pretty well. Hope you are too!
vertical and breathing, I suppose that's somewhere on the positive spectrum of things. if my memory serves me correctly you have a rad music creation station in your basement, is that correct? If so, are you still making tunes?
Spare bedroom. It's a ridiculous post-production rig but it's got a bunch of software synths. Nobody can pay for post-production anymore so that's not doing much. And generally, mixing other people's music is a game of "make it sound exactly the way it sounds in my head without me telling you what that is" so I'm no longer spending days tweaking on other peoples' music so that they can be annoyed I didn't guess their fantasy. I've probably spent 20 hours getting someone else's shit hooked up to Pro Tools, which is on an iLok I own. Then another 15 hours trying to get his shitty-ass BehringerMidas to actually, you know, output on its output card. Knowing how to mix is fundamentally an adventure in pissing people off by providing them knowledge and tech support for dozens of hours at a time. Pretty fuckin' over it.
Damn dude I hear that. The best mixing experience I've had was when I was there with the producer for every moment of the mixing process. I crashed at his house/studio for a week straight during the recording and mixing process. Fortunately he's a really good friend and gave me a homie rate of twenty-five an hour, and took a painting of mine as payment. As you can imagine we spent a lot of time together mixing a two hour contemporary jazz album. 10/10 would do again, I was much happier with the result than any of my former recording experiences.
Yeah that's the reality of the situation. If you charge someone a lot of money and it's not absolute shit? They will presume it's good because they're invested in it. If you do a favor for someone, they'll assume that since they put zero effort into it, you put zero effort into it.