Don’t Pass Up Part One!
MusiCares and the Red Cross provided support for some day-to-day expenses. L.A. County helped with a relief grant along with The Change Reaction, working through partner A Sense of Home. “Our friend Phideaux Xavier helped us with a place to stay, which had a studio in it, and countless other friends gave me studio time to cut drums and loud guitars,” says Mouser, whose resumé includes work with Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, Dream Theater, Weezer and Chris Vrenna. “The outpouring of support was amazing,” he marvels.
Mouser also mixes live sound and had just returned from a tour with Steve Hackett when the fires hit, and he had a gig with Spock’s Beard co-founder Neal Morse in London four days later. “They held a t-shirt auction and raised $3,000 for me,” he notes.
Mouse House featured a vintage 56-channel Calrec UA8000 analog console and racks of outboard, so this year Mouser has been forced by necessity to switch to a hybrid workflow for the first time. His daughter started a GoFundMe that raised enough to replace some outboard equipment. Additional financial support and gear came from Guitar Center Foundation, a Buddhist temple and a church that generously donated a Neumann U 87 mic and some preamps. Friends donated or loaned Mouser other items, including a Dangerous Music summing box. “And Gibson gave me a cherry SG, the guitar that I wish I would have never sold when I was a kid,” he says.
For now, the couple are living in a house in San Gabriel with a converted two-car garage that Mouser is using as a studio while they work on rebuilding their home. His rig now includes some of the gear on which he has long relied, including the same monitors and power amp, as well as Manley, Smart and 1176 compressors. He’s mixed a handful of albums this year on the new setup, and his longtime clients have been very happy with the results. “So it’s working,” he reports.
ALONE ON THE BLOCK
“We’re the last house standing on our block; I don’t have neighbors in either direction anymore,” says Eric Fischer, a film, television and music mixer who fled the Altadena property with his wife and his mother when the alert sounded. “We bugged out at about 3:30 in the morning,” he recalls.
His mother’s ADU was badly damaged, and he lost his studio, a garage conversion, but things could have been much worse. Thankfully, they were well-insured. “We lost some possessions, but it’s all covered and all our damages were covered. Compared to what other people in our town lost, we’re okay.” That said, he and his family needed assistance in the immediate term, of course. “I got $1,500 from MusiCares, which was wonderful.”
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The family temporarily moved into a home in Arcadia while contractors handled the fire and smoke remediation and rebuilt the ADU and studio. “Strangely enough, I’ve had the busiest year since the [Covid] lockdown, so I had to steal stuff out of the studio that didn’t get destroyed and put together a temporary room in Arcadia,” he reports. Projects have included a Hallmark Christmas movie, a horror movie, a couple of shorts and a documentary. “I’m in the middle of mixing a comedy-horror feature right now,” he adds.
Charlie Bolois’ Vertigo Recording Services, with Hiro Watanabe, are remaking the destroyed wiring, and Fischer, a former Vertigo employee and wiring guy, will install everything in his rebuilt room, which has been upgraded for Atmos. “The new gear is sitting in boxes, and in the next couple of weeks I’ll throw that into the room, have Dolby come and tune it, and I’ll be back in action.”
