Pro Sound Blog

Man I’m tired. 8-12 hours per day for about a week on drum tracks. We had 18 microphones on the drums, including Neumann U87’s on the overheads… Hell of a set up.

After drums it was bass tracks for 2.5 days. The stress level was high because the client was considerably over budget by this point. The takes were tough because the music is so difficult added to the fact that they wanted to finish fast.

Yesterday saw the completion of the bass tracks and now we assemble the double album’s “chunks” into actual pieces. Just doing this is going to take 2-3 days.

I can’t type anymore. Must…sleep.

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 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!

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.

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.

Here’s a blog post about a cool waterproof case made by OtterBox. These are great for storing professional audio or video or small high tech items.

An audio engineer could fit several microphones, digital recorders or other stuff in this case to protect them from dust or moisture.

Phone call this morning:

Large corporate client: “Yes I’m wondering where that order we need is.”

Me: “You haven’t placed an order.”

Large corporate client: “Oh, can we have it by this Friday?”

Me: “Does that mean you want to place the order?”

Large corporate client: “Yes. So can we have it Friday, in four days?”

Me: “Ok great. But as you recall I told you this job will take 7-14 days.”

Large corporate client: “Ok we need 10,000 of them.”

Me: “Ok great.”

Large corporate client: “Maybe 15,000.”

Me: “Um, well I need a number.”

Large corporate client: “I’ll have to call you back…”

Synopsis

Large corporate client wants to know where the order he hasn’t placed is, which is an unknown quantity.

I’ve finished upgrading the site. Wordpress rules. They couldn’t make it much easier. I hope this keeps the spam out for a while.

A friend of mine who I help with a wordpress site was hacked. They didn’t take his site down, rather they placed a ton of spam links hidden in his code.

That made me decide to check all my sites and sure enough this site had literally THOUSANDS of spam links hidden in the footer. Everything from erectile dysfunction to medical pot.

So I’ve changed my password, removed the malicious code and I’ll be upgrading to the newest version of WP in hopes that whatever security hole they exploited will be plugged.

Today has completely sucked, and it isn’t over. Let’s see why:

My fridge in my new condo is dead. So all my perishable food went bad. Gotta love the taste of rotten milk. For two weeks I’ve been living out of the freezer. They call me “Mr. Swanson.”

I have a bad back yet still help load the new damn fridge up FOUR flights of stairs. But wait, the idiot who is replacing the fridge “forgot” to measure the opening. The new fridge is too big. I then have to help them load the new fridge back down the four flights of stairs and I still don’t have a working fridge. “Can I offer you a warm beer? How about some chips and rotten dip?”

Oh nice. Looking out the window: IT’S SNOWING. F’n great.

My biggest client (a fortune 500 company) owes me a pile of money. Someone “forgot” to submit my bill to accounting for stuff I did at the end of February which cost me a bunch of out of pocket expense for materials. I’ve called them 2x a week for four weeks asking to confirm that they’d submitted my invoice to accounting. They assured me yes. So as of today, nearly 2 months later I still haven’t gotten paid. Yes I “loan” fortune 500 companies money.

Another client (probably a fortune 1000 company) also owes me and they “mailed a check” 10 days ago. That would have been when they were 60 days past due. No check yet of course. I “loan” fortune 1000 companies money too.

For the sake of argument, let us say that these companies have mailed my dough. I wouldn’t know, because the US Postal Service has screwed up my mail forwarding. I’m receiving mail from two companies in two different locations, none of which are mine. My mail? It’s probably in Bulgaria.

A collection agency called me this morning. Woke me up in fact. They want to collect the $432 for the “leased equipment I failed to return when I cancelled my comcast account.” One problem. I didn’t cancel my comcast account. In fact, I’m still using said equipment. Comcast just told me to “ignore” the collection agency. It’s hard to ignore someone who calls you every five minutes and wakes you up. That has now supposedly been fixed.

WOA what was that? While writing this I just heard a big crash boom bang… My huge tool set in the closet just fell over spontaneously.

I just checked and it isn’t Friday the 13th… hmm. I wouldn’t recommend anyone come near me right now.