Pro Sound Blog

This “project” I’m working on is a comedy of errors. The keyboard player has really gotten under my skin. There’s a guy like him in most bands. He’s the one who is very agreeable yet a total lazy flake. He fakes his way through everything and puts out a half assed effort.

His assignment was to have his parts recorded and bounced down and ready to submit so we can start mixing the next songs. He supposedly worked for over a month on these tracks. I get a flash drive with his audio files on it which only contains the aliases (shortcuts for windows). He never copied the actual files to the drive, just an icon which points to the files resident on his hard drive.

Naturally he didn’t notice that these audio files, which would take several if not dozens of minutes to copy, copied in a split second. He also didn’t bother to check the drive and see if the files were there. Or did he simply click the alias which opened his internal hard drive and he didn’t know it?

Problem

Ok, so no big deal. Just get the files off his main hard drive which the aliases are referring to…right? Uh, of course not. The problem now is that the files those aliases pointed to are probably in a pawn shop somewhere, as his laptop was stolen. Yes, this guy worked for a whole month on something and didn’t back it up.

I’d laugh at this guy because he put a whole month into something and because of his own stupidity and half-assed way of doing things, he has to work another month. But I’m not laughing because it effects me. This means another fucking month of waiting around for him to get his shit done. Another month of my time. Another month of dealing with this project which should have been done months ago.

I’m tempted to pull the plug and just eject on these unprofessional boneheads.

mediaguru Boneheads, Musicians, Rants, Recording

This has been a very rough summer. In fact, this summer has changed me. I’m one grouchy mother fucker now and I’ve never been like that in my entire life. I don’t like being this way. The other day I almost assaulted my landlord. I got in a “heated” discussion with him about broken shit that has been bugging me and told him I was leaving. My grouchy attitude forced me to move which sucks, even though my new place is way better.

This summer I took on a project and made some very stupid and negligent choices in doing so. The main one being that I settled on a flat rate. Big mistake. Little did I know that this project would be several months long and that I’d be in the absolute hell of listening to a horrid vocalist who is so sharp he makes Ginsu carving knives look dull. Seriously. This guy sings entire freakin’ songs sharp and he doesn’t even know it. “Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp. Dude you’re sharp.” Working with this guy is like biting into rotten lemons all day. Then after spending hours on sharp vocals and doing hundreds (I mean hundreds) of takes per song, I have to go in with a pitch correcting software and fix every goddamn note. What a waste of my time, spending dozens of hours fixing some hack’s vocal tracks rather than spending time with my kids, my woman, golfing or just picking the lint out of my ass.

I can barely look these guys in the eye now for blowing my whole fucking summer and wasting my time. Damn the freakin’ keyboard player is so clueless I can’t begin to write about it. After being told his tracks would be all pre-done and ready to lay down I find out they’re not. Then, rather than doing so on his own, says he’d rather have me there to lay them down. No thought about my time, my gas or whatever. I drew the line there and said now way. It would have taken days and days to do that work he was supposed to have done previously.

That flat rate is looking pretty f’n small now since it has been spread out over months and months and months. Did I mention I had to drive 45 minutes each way for 2 months just to go listen to out of tune vocals? Bonus. Good thing gas hit $4.00/gallon right when I started this project. Perfect timing. Might as well take that flat fee and pour it down the fucking gas tank and dump what’s left into auto maintenance and repairs…

My personal life and other business ventures have suffered severely as a result of doing this gig and I’m just plain irritable as hell.

Bran for breakfast?

Now, thank God, we’re mixing. The problem is that we’re doing it at my personal residence. Now the drummer needs to come in and tell me to make his playing and his kit sound like someone other than his own. This guy is a fiber nut and eats about 1704% of his daily allowance of fiber. So he has to take a shit every 24 seconds. Freakin’ wonderful. I’ve got to go to coscto now and buy 120 rolls of toilet paper just because this bran/shit addict is invading my private space. And I wonder. How is shitting 63 times a day enjoyable?

I’m done dealing with musicians. I really mean it. I used to like engineering but I don’t anymore. It isn’t fun. It is grueling, monotonous, frustrating and insanely infuriating when dealing with amateurs. My ears have started ringing too and that has me worried.

mediaguru Boneheads, Musicians, Rants, Recording

Reason #7 ProTools sucks? Plug-ins cost more.

Say you find a plug for VST or other systems which runs around $200.
The same exact TDM plug for ProDrools would cost about $500.

mediaguru Rants, Why ProTools Sucks

I just converted a session from ProTools to Cubase. I had to convert the files from 24-bit (ProTools) to 32-bit (Cubase). Seems odd I’d have to “upgrade” my audio files to go from an insanely expensive and industry standard system costing tens of thousands of bucks, in order to work with a program that retails for $799.

Do you have any idea how much of a headroom difference there is between 24-bit and 32-bit recording? It’s huge.

Steinberg’s Cubase and Nuendo can record 32-bit and they cost from $199-$2,000.
ProTools maxes out at 24-bit and can cost tens of thousands of $$$.

Reason #6 ProTools sucks? The cost per bit!

mediaguru Rants, Why ProTools Sucks

In the Mac operating system, hitting the tab key while in an open or save dialog box tabs you through to the filename and highlights it. So say you want to save a new file, you hit save as and then a save dialog pops up. If you hit tab, the file name becomes active and highlighted and you just start typing your filename.

This function is a time saver, especially if you deal with a lot of files. In ProDrools, this doesn’t happen. Tab does nothing. But ProTools isn’t about saving time, it’s about taking MORE time, so your big expensive studio can bill your client more hours and make more money, thus helping you afford your overpriced recording system.

mediaguru Rants, Why ProTools Sucks

If you have ProTools running (I’m on the Mac OS by the way), hooking up any kind of drive results in a pain in the ass.

Let’s say you’re working in a ProTools project and your daughter comes in and needs you to print something off of some flash drive or portable drive she brought in from a computer at school or something. You leave the PT environment and print the document. Then you try to eject the drive, but you can’t. It’s in use by ProTools. You then have to go into ProDrools, go to the “workspace” drop down menu, and then select about the 50th menu selection down called “unmount.”

Upon inspection of this drive you had to “unmount” there is a new folder on there called “Digidesign Databases.” I didn’t f’ing ask ProDrools to put a damn thing on this drive. I didn’t tell ProDrools that this drive was going to ever be used for any sort of project.

ProTools owns every drive you hook up to your system while it is running, whether you want it to or not.  And that is another reason ProTools sucks.

mediaguru Rants, Why ProTools Sucks

Tonight I just completed the setup for the big double album technical rock band 1.5 month project. Now I know it is likely that some of these band members I’m working with will be reading my journals here, so be warned not to take any of it too deeply. It’s all in fun… maybe.

The setup went fairly well with a few problems due to the drummer.

First the drummer was late because his dog was “pissing diarrhea blood out it’s ass” and his wife was puking because she was pregnant and couldn’t smell it. Man I couldn’t imagine the hell that guy is going through (not with the dog, with having a pregnant wife).

2nd the drummer’s setup is enormous. He must have literally 20 cymbals. Don’t forget the rototoms and octobans. His kit is so tightly set up, there’s almost nowhere to get the mics into place. Before he could set his kit up he had to vacuum his carpet (see picture)! Believe it or not, that’s happened more times than I can count. Anal drummers… Can’t live with them, can’t kill them.

I haven’t worked in this studio for a few months. It was an experience for me trying to remember how the studio’s patching from room to room was setup, along with remembering the basic functions of the Euphonix console. The main owner/engineer was there to help, which was very good.

One of the tasks before we can record was to figure out how to get all the keyboard tracks into ProTools (or ProDrools as I prefer to call it). The keyboard player, bless his heart, doesn’t know much about what he’s doing. He didn’t even know what or if he had an audio interface with his Apple Logic Express system. He didn’t.

When importing the midi files, the individual takes or chunks were all broken up into separate tracks by ProDrools. I figured that I had to use a merge function in logic to merge each track individually first, before importing into PT. I’m not sure if Cubase is the same, but maybe that’s an entry #3 for my section called “why protools sucks.”

The setup took almost 6 hours, protools issues and drummers included. Tomorrow we start at high noon with the tracking of drums and bass. Noon is pretty late for me. The guys in the band have been complaining a bit about the schedule and not having enough days booked in May/June, yet they want to start at noon. If we started at 9am each day instead of noon, we’d gain one of those precious days back every three…

Off to bed.

mediaguru Musicians, Random, Rants, Recording, Why ProTools Sucks

ProTools sucks as a MIDI tool.  The tool set ProTools comes with is a fraction of what other applications have.

The worst part I’ve run into is that ProTools demolishes MIDI data when importing it from other applications.  I’ve imported standard MIDI files from numerous other applications only to find the formatting of the tracks and the timelines are so messed up that they’re unuseable.

mediaguru Rants, Why ProTools Sucks

I had a gig scheduled for tonight. It was to be the biggest paying gig of the year and perhaps even the biggest paying gig I’ve ever had. I got a phone call from some lady I don’t know who said she’d been “calling the band leader for a month straight” trying to confirm the gig. She said she was getting someone else if I didn’t call the band leader and get back to her in 1/2 an hour.

I didn’t hear back from the band leader in time and she booked someone else. When the band leader did call me back, he said “fuck ‘em. I don’t feel like playing for them anyway.” Hmmm… Fuck them? Fuck me too. How about considering that this gig was going to pay a shit load of my bills?

mediaguru Gigs, Rants

My 2nd gig last weekend was at “Tattoos-R-Us” club. We had an opening band so I didn’t have to show up until about 10:45. When I got there I noticed that they screwed up again and didn’t have our band name on the marquee.

I got in the club and grabbed my usual cranberry juice. I checked out the opening band and they were pretty good. They were a surf band and the guitar player had a Theremin.

When I walked back stage to open the back door and load my gear, I noticed another drum kit. I started adding up things in my head and went to talk to the sound guy. I asked him how many bands were playing and he said two. I asked who the 2nd band was and he pointed at a table in the audience and said “them.”

My band wasn’t playing.

I called my singer outside and he confirmed that we were not playing and apologized for forgetting to call me. It appears our bass player’s father had a heart attack and she canceled. It’s nice to drive 189 city blocks just to go drink a f’n cranberry juice and breathe a bunch of 2nd hand smoke. How considerate.

mediaguru Gigs, Rants