Pro Sound Blog

I’m in Palm Springs in the press room covering a golf tournament. Next door the Charley Daniels band is doing their sound check. Kick drum, kick drum, fiddle, fiddle, bass, keys, and then it happened…

The guitar player started playing. The tone was perfect. The notes were perfect. He was playing “Circumstances” by Rush.

It was a loooong day, 12 hours or so. We were going to start the downbeat at noon, but didn’t really get started till quite a while later. There were still tweaks to do on the levels as expected, but the drummer wasn’t tuned. He was going to get there early and be ready by noon but he wasn’t. That increased the stress level of his band mates because they have a set budget and amount of time and they can’t go over it.

Rule #1 of recording is that it always takes longer than you expect.

Crappy drummer

The drummer is fast as hell. He’s got some definite speed and skills. The reason I say crappy drummer, is that this guy is way into eating about 4075% more fiber per day than the human body is designed to take. Therefore this guy has to go take a shit seemingly between every take. At about $100/hour for this studio those are some expensive logs.

Ear fatigue

I’ve really got to take it easy with the volume. I haven’t done sessions like this for a few years and now that I’m a bit “older” I can’t take the loud levels for 12 straight hours like I used to. I need to have all these guys on headphones and keep the control room levels down. That way they can have it as loud as they want without hurting my ears any more than the decades of recording I’ve done already have.

The protools 7.4 rig started to gag later in the evening as well, leading me to the following post after this, why protools sucks #4, #5 and possibly #6.

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.

I’m engineering a big double album for a technical rock band. No doubt I’ll have some rants about it which I’ll post here. My schedule is going to be hectic.

My first “concern” came when I consulted with the keyboard player. He didn’t know what kind of “files” he had or much of anything. I asked him a few questions about the tracks he’s prepared in advance but all his answers were “I don’t know.” All he knew was that he had a Kurtzweil keyboard and just bought Apple’s Logic software. I get the joy of figuring out how to either export midi from Logic into ProTools and/or syncing ProTools with Logic. The catch is, the whole project will end up in Cubase 4.0 so any of that original conversion will be converted again. Converting the converted conversion…

I haven’t done a ton of OMFing but I will have after this. I just home my OMFing doesn’t turn into OMFGing.

I don’t watch TV anymore. There’s too much entertaining stuff on YouTube.

Here’s a Van Halen concert gone bad. Seems that the “pre-recorded” keyboard parts have been accidentally transposed without the knowledge of Eddy or anyone else. Perhaps the sampling frequency on their DAT machine was set wrong.

My rock & roll band is going into the studio today to do some music. It seems the developers of a Nintendo Wii game similar to Guitar Hero are fans. Should be fun to hear yourself play on a video game.

The one “issue” is that the studio we’re recording in, is run by a guy who I’ve known for a long time and is a total bonehead. This guy walks around town speaking with a British accent, even though he’s probably never even been to the U.K… bonehead.

I bet this band doesn’t get too many “church” function gigs…

I’ve got some clients who, I swear, the only reason they record is so they have someone to talk to. It’s like being their bartender. Most of these types are fairly old. Today I’m working with one of them.

Dean

Dean is a very religious guy, and a piano player. He’s pretty good, especially for being over 80 years old. I’ve done several albums for Dean, and 3/4 of the time is spent “talking” and not recording or working on the project. I work with him in 4 hours, but my phone just rang. He’s calling to give me directions to his place, for the 4th time. Each time he goes on for what seems to be about an hour, just giving me directions.

Yesterday he called to give me a better set of directions than the two previous times but I had to tell him I was on the other line and driving down the road so I couldn’t write the new set of directions down. I won’t use any of his directions anyway. I’ll just google map it. He doesn’t need to know that though.

I have a new voice mail.

UPDATE: 40 minutes after I posted…. the phone is ringing again.

At the gig last night this guy comes up on the first break and tells me “man you’re off the chain.” I didn’t quite understand that. I guess this means he liked my drumming. I think he mean to say “you’re off the hook.”

He then tells me and my singer that he plays drums and bass. So my singer says “come up and play a tune with us.”

Guy jumps up on the next set and we play a 1-4-5 slow blues song. This is cake. Well he starts “soloing” (badly) over everything and can’t even follow the damn progression. Our singer is yelling across the stage “C man, C!!!” and he’s looking at the bass like the C note left the building.

What an ass.

So I’m working into the rotation at the big studio. Right now I’m not getting the most “prestigious” gigs.

I’m working with a hack acoustic guitar player and I just can’t get his guitar to sound very crisp. I’ve got a friggin’ $8000 Neumann microphone on this guy’s guitar and it sounds terrible. No crispness at all. It sounds like the mic is across the room pointing the other direction.

I go in the sound booth to see what is up. Maybe the guy took his shoes off and hung his shoe on the mic?

All thumbs

As it turns out, this guy is paying $100/hour to record his acoustic tracks and he’s playing the guitar with the meat of his thumb. DOH! I asked “where’s your guitar pick?” and he says “I don’ t use one.” Hmm… I say “that’s probably why it doesn’t sound very crisp.”

Later in the session when I go to set up an auto-tuner on his vocals I ask the same guy what key the song is in. “I don’t know” is his answer. So I ask “what chord are you playing on the last note of the song?” “I don’t know” again. The guy is self taught, doesn’t use a guitar pick, and doesn’t know what a chord is. He was playing a bastardized G chord…

Normally I’d say “kill me” in this situation, but I’m glad to have a gig at this point so no worries. Just get a friggin’ guitar lesson before the next session please…