Posts from — March 2008

The Voices.mp3

Megan and I worked on some more tunes last night.  Other than a misdirected mic (don’t ask!), no more tech woes.  This is a song I wrote about fifteen years ago.  Megan picked it up and comped on the keys while she sang.  With a little work I think we’ll have a pretty nice track. 

Well well…I am now well into my tenth or eleventh session with my Mac and I still love it.  I picked up Logic Audio Pro not too long ago, and I gotta tell ya – I will be keeping up my chops in Pro Tools – but for songwriting I just can’t see why I would use anything but Logic.  Plugged into the Apogee Duet it smokes ProTools MBOX 2 Pro – hands down – for sonic depth and clarity.  It’s low latency monitoring coupled with Logic’s makes it too easy to record tracks real time without any artifacts.

There were some peculiarities installing it – it wants to load up your main HD with 40gb of stuff (usefull stuff, but hey I am runing WindowsXP and MacOS X on my MacBook and have limited disk space) – so you have to make sure you have plenty of room, then just move and alias all the big sound files later.  Once that’s done, works like a charm.

I have a couple of sessions this week with collaborators (Jon Mellen and Megan Fong) which may turn into something I post here – we’ll see.

If you haven’t tried Logic, one other VERY cool thing about it is it can import GarageBand sessions – which lets me work with singer / songwriters who don’t have much gear but at least have Macs.  VERY COOL.

Oh, one final thing.  I learned this the hard way.  Don’t upgrade to Leopard unless you don’t use ProTools – and unless you like doing lots of tweaking and patching.  It still doesn’t cut the mustard.

I first heard this cat on “Live From Abbey Road” on cable.  WOW.  He could sing from the phonebook and make it sound good.  I hope he keeps producing records.  I prefer his raw sound on his first album but check out “Three More Days” on his second album – it kills.  http://www.raylamontagne.com/

Wow!  LOVE it.  Great songs, excellent production – my only complaint is how long it took them to get it done. Grab this album.   www.meetgoodwin.com    

So I have been running VMWare Fusion now for PC duties on my MacBook, and it’s working like a charm.  Loving it.

I also just upgraded my Mac to Leopard – more on that later.

 A couple of new additions to the kit that I forgot to mention:

• Apogee Duet (MAN THIS THING ROCKS)
• Virtual Guitarist 2 (runs on the Mac unlike its predecessors)

I’m also generally not using the US-428 – I just don’t need it.  I did need to install my Virtual Instruments on the Fusion Windows XP install – so I could use them to dump tracks from my PC projects to my Mac projects.  They work just fine, no issues at all.

I also did a lot of research on Firewire devices, Pro Tools, Macs and audio recording and production.  Even though almost everywhere says “Don’t use your ProTools MBOX with anything else on the bus” yada yada, I am having some nice success.

I was running into the issue of simply not having more than a single FW port – I have the LiquidMix, MBOX2 Pro, Duet and a Powercore FW.  Even though Digidesign says don’t use the extra FW port on the MBOX2 for anything while you’re using the MBOX, I was running the Powercore off of it.  The Powercore has three ports on the back, but for some reason I can never get a FW device that’s plugged in to one of them to work right.  I wonder if I don’t have a very early unit that had some issue with these ports.

So – I have a 23″ Cinema Display and I ran the FW off the MacBook to that, giving me two ports (yes this is effectively a hub) – ran the MBOX and Powercore off one port and then the Liquid Mix off the other.  No worries at all!  When the Duet got added into the mix, I was worried I would have to just use it for tracking, then disconnect it for mixdown (the Liquid Mix doesn’t have but one FW port, either – just like the Duet – so they couldn’t be daisy chained).  But!  On a lark I got a Belkin 6 port FW hub (from MicroCenter, in the Mac section) – and believe it or not, I could run all the devices off of it!  No problems at all.

To test the theory, I ran mixes with 20 total externally-driven plugins or more (10 on the LiquidMix, 10 on the Powercore) out through both the MBOX and the Duet, with no problems.  I was actually pretty suprised.  I suspect that if my plugin counts get too high, I will start to see some issues, but right now everything runs smooth as silk.  Chalk me up as a permanent Mac convert, this is amazing.

Now if I could only convince the wife that I needed a new Mac Pro…

Same Look Twice.mp3

After we got over some of our technical issues, we recorded this through a Neumann TLM 103 into a DBX 586 tube pre (not my favorite pre, I am going to get an Avalon soon I hope).  One mic, ambient, just a songwriter and her craft. Next time I capture this talented singer I will do a much better job (probably a different mic) but one can still hear the potential on this track.  She’s awesome.  

By the way, here’s a pic of my home studio.  I managed to actually use the Tascam US-428 and now with VMWare Fusion I am running Acid on my Mac!  I chose to use network drives attached to another PC so I could still access my data from a PC, but it works like a charm.

The cool Henry Rollins and a couple of the prints are by way of Gabe Richesson.  He’s an awesome artist and a friend of mine – I love his work.  He also has a website that I helped him with, though he mostly just keeps his blog updated.

Well, I recently did a session with a great local singer (Megan Fong) that sealed the deal for me – I am moving my recording and production chores from the PC to Apple Macintosh. 

 While were were able to cut some rough guitar / vocal demo tracks, we had a few problems with the PC and eventually switched over to ProTools on my MacBook and things went flawlessly.

Even installing all the right firewire patches, etc. on my PC didn’t make it run smoothly – I would still get blue screens from time to time when running firewire devices during both recording and playback.

 Therefore, here’s my new rig:

•  Apple MacBook 2.0Ghz Core Duo, 80GB HD, 2GB RAM
• 2×500GB Maxtor OneTouchPlus 4 FW/USB 2.0 HD (one for audio tracking, one for libraries and instrument files)
• 1×750GB Maxtor OneTouch Plus 4 FW/USB 2.0 HD (for backup)
• ProTools MBox2 Pro Factory Bundle w/ProTools LE 7.X
• Steinberg Cubase 4
• TC Electronic Powercore Firewire
• Focusrite LiquidMix
• Event Studio Precision 6 Monitors
• KRK RP-5 Powered Monitors w/RP-10S Powered Subwoofer
• Alesis Monitor One Monitors

I have a pretty nice selection of mics and a couple of decent pre-amps, but need to add more in this category, especially the pre-amps:

• Neumann TLM 103 Studio Condenser
• Blue Dragonfly Studio Condenser
• Shure KSM-42 Studio Condenser
• Rode NTK Studio Tube Condenser w/Pre
• DBX 586 Dual Tube Pre w/Digital I/O Option
• Tons of miscellaneous dynamic and lower end condenser mics

I also have some interesting outboard gear, some of which isn’t in high utilization any longer but I’ll list it here for information purposes:

• TC-Helicon VoicePrism Plus
• Electrix WarpFactory
• 2x Alesis ADAT-XT20
• Sony PCM-500 DAT
• MOTU Midi Timepiece

This is the stuff that only works on my PC and thus probably won’t get used much anymore:

• MOTU 2408 MKIII Core
• Sonic Foundry Acid Pro 6.0
• Sonic Foundry SoundForge 8.0
• Tascam Gigastudio Orchestra 3 (might use a PC to run this as it sounds great)

Some other audio interfaces I have lying around:

• Tascam / Frontier US-428 (remember this?)

Software Synths and Instruments (some Mac, some PC, some both):

• Steinberg The Grand
• Steinberg Virtual Guitarist
• Steinberg VG Acoustic Edition
• BFD
• BFD 2
• Spectrasonics Stylus
• Spectrasonics Stylus RMX
• Spectrasonics Atmosphere
• Spectrasonics Trilogy

Finally, I am experimenting with VMWare Fusion – I think I will be able to track into Acid on my Mac, then send the files over to ProTools for mixdown and production.  I will update you more on this as I learn more, as it sure would be nice to be able to do this so I can still use my cool Sony software and my Gigistudio.  Gotta figure out how all the disk stuff works though.

Ok, so you might know of this band because of the movie Once.  Glen Hansard is the leader of this group and he was the star of the movie.  His band has been around a while and this is an album that probably puts them in the mainstream.  The grammy award winning song “Falling Slowly” is also on this album, but I don’t think it’s the version from the movie.   http://www.theframes.ie/