I was the lead on recording the closing keynote at Blogher. My role on this crew meant that I wore headphones for two days and fiddled with knobs to KEEP THE GREEN LIGHT ON, for God's sake, KEEP THE GREEN LIGHT ON. I was so terrified of the orange and the red lights popping up on the machine that I sat on the edge of my seat, literally, for the first day I did this. And since this was truly a grassroots operation (that didn't act or feel amateurish, really, because of the excellent people involved.) we had several different models of recorders. So when I'd go into a room, there might be a totally different type of machine, with different kinds of knobs and buttons that I wasn't sure were the right ones to push and the GREEN LIGHT IN A DIFFERENT PLACE. Horror.
But every time I finished a session with one of my fellow pod people, we ended up with a new disk to give to Toy, 
so that meant there was something concrete that came out of it. Of course, every time I turned one over I had to also turn over my fear that this one would be the blank one...that the green light, in this case, had lied.
It was so much fun to have been a part of creating this. It's amazing how sensitive recordings are to different vocal pitches, as well as volumes, and where one person's voice would make your recorder perfectly happy, another person's voice would send it into RED LIGHT RED LIGHT DANGER DANGER GREEN LIGHT IS GONE MODE. You have to be really precise and really responsive to make sure that it ends up sounding like all the people were in the same room, at least - especially if, as in many cases here, a microphone is weaving through the crowd and people are actually, frighteningly, speaking into it. I'm not a detail person, typically, but I liked the challenge of following the proceedings and responding to the changes in the sounds I was hearing. It was fun in a very obsessive-compulsive sort of way.
My worst fear of a blank disk at least didn't come true for this closing session, which was a pretty important one since it featured Arianna Huffington, and Grace Davis, and Mena Trott, and Washington Post/ Newsweek Interactive CEO Caroline Little (moderated by Chris Nolan.) I'm really happy about that. Toy had to have polished them up with her considerable editing skill, but at least my levels, as Kirk put it, do seem to have been okay.
I think I'm going to go talk into a tape recorder now. And if I'm taping you, I promise to wear the big headphones so you'll know.
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