Pro Sound Blog

I’m working on some new music in the studio with my two buddies Kent and Matt. This is like our millionth studio project. We get together to work on some kind of music every Wednesday.

Last week we started to work on the drums of this new tune. We have some basic dummy tracks down from the week before (bass, keys, theremin). The music we usually do is very technical. This tune however, is much more straight ahead and simple. The tune has a shuffle groove at a medium pace. As a drummer (and a musician) I find it harder to play slower tempo tunes and sound tight than fast ones. This tune is no exception.

I did take after take last week on this simple tune. I just couldn’t get the groove happening to my satisfaction. After about 3 hours I threw my cans off and called it a night. My chops just weren’t there that night.

I played a gig last Friday night and I had hoped maybe that would get my chops back. It may have done the trick because tonight I sat down and did the tune after about 15 minutes of tracking. Not only did I do in 15 minutes what I couldn’t do in 3 hours last week, it sounded decent too. It just happened with no extra concentration and no forcing it.

So the moral to the story for me is something that has bugged me about doing studio work for the last 20+ years as an engineer. You have to be able to tell when your takes are happening and when they are not. If you sit there in the studio doing it over and over and over forever then move on! Do something else…go to dinner…do jumping jacks. Playing the same freaking take a million times will not usually result in an good sounding & inspired cut. If you can’t get it in the first few takes do yourself, your bandmates, your engineer and your record label a favor TAKE A BREAK.

I’ve just set up the little site meter counter (as seen below). It is currently sitting there happily at hit count 1. Sitemeter is a free counter that not only counts your hits but provides you many interesting stats about them. It can tell you certain info about your hits like the referring page (i.e. did they click a link to get there), their IP adress, their timezone, if they used a search engine and what keywords did they type in to the engine, and so on…

The reason I chose “owners manuals suck” (thanks Matt), is that I got that little guy placed here in the blog, the portal and the forums without any manual reference! Yeah yeah that may be easy to some (and it is to me now), but I had to figure out what file and where to place the HTML. See the forum/portal portion is php based rather than html. So there is an entirely different language going on with the server. The server itself is actually generating the pages rather than the html.

All this crap doesn’t have much to do with pro audio or music but hey I don’t care. The way I work with this kind of stuff goes into music/midi/computers etc as well. If something is SO complicated that you need a manual to figure out basic tasks, it is simply going to stiffle or ruin the creative genius you were about to execute.

The gear needs to be a tool and an aid to make the creative process better and more enjoyable, not a tech support nightmare.