Pro Sound Blog

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 just finished a small audio job for a mime artist. Yes, they’re still around.

I had a bit of a hard time ascertaining what work he wanted done though, since he was “miming” his instructions to me, har har.

I haven’t been working in the big studio for a few months. They were all into having me work there and I did a bunch of sessions. Then one day they stopped calling to have me do gigs. The owner and main engineer wasn’t returning my calls or emails. I thought perhaps I’d done something wrong but nothing came to mind. It just happened that the economic downturn forced the owner to work the gigs himself to save money, rather than paying freelance engineers.

I do have a project coming up at the big studio though which I’m looking forward to. It’s a technical rock band I’ve done two albums for. They’re insanely good, fast, technical, anal etc. They’re a similar band to say Dream Theater and Rush.

This upcoming project is going to be a DOUBLE album. There will be at least 43 billion notes on this project, which should provide some good Pro Sound Blogging opportunities.

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.

The bar tending/recording gig at the old guy’s house went pretty well. He had a steinway piano but insisted on keeping the lid shut. So I didn’t get the sound I really could have but he was happy. I guess older folks like this guy are “cold” because his place was about 134 degrees and the heat was still going. I was frying.

Just heard from the guy and he wants to do some of the 26 tunes over so…it’s back to the furnace Monday…

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.

I’ve added a new category: “Why ProTools Sucks.”

This section will be where I voice my opinion about Digidesign’s ProTools digital audio recording hardware/software. ProTools has become the industry standard in the recording world. It’s the buzz word everyone always knows.

But in my opinion there are many systems out there which can do what ProTools does, even better. Add that to the fact that you can get these systems for a fraction of what ProTools costs… Customer service? Yeah well i remember calling a 900 number for my ProTools questions, paying $3/minute, being on hold for 47 minutes and then getting asked “did you plug it in?” There goes $150 bucks… But if you have thousands of extra dollars to waste on an overpriced recording system, I guess you can pay $150 bucks to be on hold for 47 minutes.

CAN’T SELECT MULTIPLE MARKERS

I’m editing this book on CD. It’s a 350 page book where the author has read the entire thing. The author has a speech impediment and screws up constantly. So there are over 3000 markers in this ProTools project, each is an edit or fix that needs to be done.

I’ve got the book edited and now I need to get rid of most of the 3000 markers and put new ones in. So about 2800 of the markers need to be deleted. Should be easy, right? Just select a marker, hold down the shift key, then select the end of the group you want to delete….right? WRONG. You can’t select multiple markers in ProTools. You can delete ALL the markers, but you can’t say select 30 of them and delete them, leaving the rest.

I have the choice of deleting all 3000 markers, and losing the 200 I want to keep. Or I can delete 2800 markers, one at a time. Oh you can’t just hit the delete key when you have a marker selected either. You have to select the marker, then use a pull down menu to select “clear marker.” This process would take me close to 10,000 mouse clicks on this project. Is digidesign willing to pay my doctor bill for ligament damage which I’ll incur from clicking my mouse so many times?

One of the gigs the big studio I’m at is doing right now is a book on tape or book on CD as the case may be. The guy reading has a lot of “issues” with his pronunciation and English skills.

So he’s read his entire book into three different ProTools sessions. Each session is at least 400 minutes. Each session also has about 1000 out-takes or flubs which need to be edited out.

I volunteered to edit the book, knowing that there was a lot of material and it would be a good gig for a while. They initially had someone else doing it but now they’ve given the edit to me.

So the studio bought a Digidesign MBox Pro, which comes with ProTools LE and I’ve got it set up in my living room. I’ve edited for three hours so far and I’m getting into the flow. It’s taking about an hour to edit 10 pages of the book and the book is 350 pages. I’m sure I’ll get faster and by the time I’m done with this sucker I’ll have my first evaluation and impressions of ProTools LE and the MBox on my Apple MacBook.

Stay tuned.