In the morning, my first action was to wash out my groggy eyes and pick up a much needed bar of soap at the corner store. After cleaning off the filth from the day before, I decided to take it easy. Taking it easy means, lying down with the laptop, away from the scorching sun, and just working on the blog or other tasks. Since I had plans that would take me to Hyderabad the next day, I took the day to slow down a bit.Waqar head out for his train to Lahore, to find more stories to record. I continued working on some preparations to begin English translation work for the subtitles for “Risalo”. In the evening I went walking with a group of friends, ate some snacks and tea to congratulate Abdullah for getting admission into the mphil program he wanted, then head back to the hostel.I taught some wordpress to my friend Saqib, before making family calls. I was tired by around midnight, but I could not sleep. There are a lot of components to this project, and many to just the music aspect of it in itself. I had spoken to the female singers the day before, who had not done any prep work even after people were paid to rehearse them. I felt like Sur Kalyan, the opening chapter of the film needed to go to another singer I was scheduled to meet tomorrow. Sur Sohni needed to be sang by a woman, and being almost half the film, it was a big responsibility.I don’t feel comfortable giving the work to someone who has a hard time just reading the script several times. Not hard as in she is not able to read, but that it feels like unneeded effort. The singers and Anb Jogi looked at me like I was stupid for insisting that they needed to be prepared enough to sing entire chunks of the chapter at a time. They tried to convince me that even though reading the script was difficult now, they would magically sing it and could easily rerecord each verse as necessary. That would work if you are recording vocals separate in a sound booth, listening to harmonium on head phones, but that is not the setup at Sindhology.Having mixed and edited all the recordings I have done at Sindhology previously, I know what to expect. While each instrument and vocal is miked carefully to focus on that particular sound, all elements are recorded at once. The vocal track will have a slight harmonium sound in it etc. This works perfectly well for adjusting levels, but it is not good for splicing bits of the vocal track in and out, when the sound of instruments will continue to drone.Anyway, they thought I was being a pain about the whole thing, not understanding so I agreed to check with the audio engineer, Zulfikar Ali Gopang sahib. The whole thing is very worrisome though. While there is no way to know whether each of the other singers will do the necessary prep work, they at least are familiar with singing these verses. They each took the script and looked at it carefully, even sharing their knowledge regarding the pieces and how they are presented musically when we met. This one chapter, Sohni, on the other hand, worries me a great deal.I looked up a bunch of audio recording articles, to get a few perspectives on different workflows. This really is not stuff I should need to do, but after leaving them to rehearse and finding they achieved literally nothing, I have to be even more hands on with this process, which is hard to imagine. Eventually, I was tired enough that even stress could not keep me awake and I fell asleep at around 4am.