Category — My Studio

Well I think I finally have reasonable space, workflow and ergonomics setup in my house in Austin, Tx.  I am using an upstairs “bonus room” as my studio.  Someday we’ll enclose it with french doors I hope, but until then it seems to work just fine.

I’ve got a Mac Pro, MacBook and a Mac Mini in here, along with most of my other stuido gear and microphones.  I am still mixing on the Event monitors with help from KRKs as needed.

Not using VMWare as much anymore – my workflow has pretty much moved to Logic 9 and ProTools 8+.   I do Boot Camp my Mac (which now has 16Gb of memory and  6 TB of internal disk) for Windows stuff – mostly games to be honest.  Which means I mostly never boot to Windows.

This room will eventually get hard wood floors and new fixtures…someday!

I originally wrote this in first person for Parker to sing, but she’s not quite up to this level of verbalization.  So she makes a cameo, and I do the tune in third person.

True.

What’s My Name Again (remix)?.mp3

Parker likes to freestyle in the studio.  “Yeah baby” and “Put your hands in the air like you just don’t care!” are some favorite quips of hers.  SHE’S FIVE!

I guess it doesn’t help that her favorite song is “Insane In The Membrane” by Cypress Hill.  Daddy’s fault.

Anywho, here’s a “chill out” (listen on headphones, repetitive themes that sloooooow yooooou doooooown) tune I whipped up from some of her freestyle riffs in my studio.  It’s repetitive yes, but hey, I had little to work with

Get a glass of wine and put on the headphones and chill out for three and half minutes.  Not bad for a five year old.

Spring.mp3

A couple more artifacts from last weekend.  Admittedly, we rushed these so the production value could be better, and we had a couple of noisy spots that couldn’t be helped.  But here they are for your listening pleasure.

Right On Time.mp3

Always.mp3

Justin and I recorded this tune of his at my house last weekend.  I added a little mixin’…

Pretty soon he should have his demo tracks ready to go.  More to come…

I Turned Out For You.mp3

Justin Strackany  (shown here) came over last night to see if we could work together (which we do in real life) on recording some demo tracks for his approaching foray into “playing out” again for the first time in years.  The result, “Glen Tipton” is a catchy, Nick Drake-ish tune that I find myself listening to multiple times.  We did it in about two takes (way to go Justin) and there will be more Justin to follow.  If you’re wondering who “K K Venton” is (I certainly was), I believe Justin really meant K K Downing, one of the guitar players for Judas Priest.  But the song doesn’t flow as well with that lyric, so we kept the former.

Oh, and yeah , we celebrated with four Cuban cigars, three bottles of wine, and one broken Waterford Lisemore large goblet.  Guess who broke it?  I’ll never tell…

Tech specs on the recording:

• Justin’s Yamaha guitar
• Justin’s voice
• Apogee Duet FW audio interface
• Shure KSM32 on guitar
• Rode NTK tube mic on vocals
• Recorded into Logic Pro 8

Glen Tipton.mp3

Ok, so the new hard drives arrived.  Two gloriously bubble wrapped 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives from NewEgg.com.  Now, I have heard some complaints about their shipping, and about these drives – so I upgraded to FedEx shipping and both my drives seem to working flawlessly.  Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook pro is perhaps the easiest drive install I’ve ever done.  Just four screws for the caddy, and the rest was without tools and painless.

I have decided (since I already did a Logic install) that I will leave the “vanilla” logic install, including Jam Packs and all that jazz, on the 320Gb system drive.  After all it’s on the same SATA controller as the other drives anyway.  Henceforth, however, all samples, content, instruments, etc. will go on the Media Library drive – the new Barracuda.

All my project data goes on the other Barracuda.

It’s taking about three hours to copy over my 200gb+ of samples and instruments, but I am sure this is primarily because of the speed of the USB 2.0 external drive I am copying from.

Oh, as an aside, my MacMini is now my “main” computer – dunno what I am going to do with all those PCs I’ve accumulated.  I went ahead and purchased the elgato Turbo.264 and have to say that I LOVE it.  Whereas before if I was encoding a DVD to AppleTV, I could basically do nothing on my mini, now I can read email, even watch another video, while encoding.  And the quality is great.  I highly recommend this product.

More to come when the memory arrives, I load up a lot of instruments, and we try this rig out.

Well, I just ruined my Christmas and birthday for the next two years!  I had to agree that I wouldn’t buy another computer until after 2010 to get it, but I finally broke down and bought a new MacPro – and holy cow does it rock!

I bought the base  (if you can call an eight Xeon system base) entry-level 8-way MacPro – upgrading to better CPUs, etc. just didnt’ seem worth the expense.

However, I went ahead and purchased a few extras to configure this machine as a truly “one stop shop” for all my music production needs – I’ll discuss my final configuration in a bit.

Out of the box, this thing looks and performs awesome!  I did a couple of tests with it, one a DVD to H264 conversion, the other a Logic project performance test.  Both were somewhat subjective, but here’s what I found:

• The DVD conversion process was about 10x faster than on my MacBook (my MacBook is a Core Duo, not Core 2 – but 10x is pretty amazing) – took about 12 minutes!
• The music test was much more subjective – however, anyone that’s done any Logic’ing on an older MacBook probably gets this.  On my MacBook, I had a 24 track project with a few plug-ins, using an Apogee Duet, A Powercore Firewire, and a Focusrite LiquidMix.  Sometimes, starting up a project I would get system overload errors, disk speed errors, etc. and couldn’t get it to play.  Usually, playing it over and over it would eventually cache (I think) enough info that I could mix the session.  With the MacPro?  Let’s just say that even running most of my audio data off a USB2.0 drive (leaving the Firewire bus for audio I/O and the Powercore and LiquidMix), I was able to launch my test project flawlessly, it never burped at all and the CPU monitors (yes, all EIGHT of them) didn’t even register that anything was going on!

My current config is that I have a 320Gb OS drive, and all my music files are stored on two external USB2.0 drives – one for my project files, and one for audio files and virtual instruments.  I found that even on the MacPro, it’s better not to do disk I/O on the same bus as audio I/O – I always seem to get noise of some kind at some point.  Separating out the disk I/O from the audio I/O and plug-in processing seems to fix any problems.  I am runnin 2Gb of memory.

However, here’s how it will look soon:

• - (8) 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU
• 10Gb memory
• 320Gb system / OS drive
• 1.5TB project drive
• 1.5TB virtual instrument / sample drive

The drives are all 3GB/s SATA drives hosted right in the computer – NewEgg had a screaming deal on 1.5TB Seagates ($189!) that I couldn’t pass up.  Now, I won’t need to use ANY USB2.0 while doing music production.  I will use my existing external drives as backup drives for the internal drives – so nothing’s wasted.  I don’t need RAID – it’s probably overkill – but at some point if I needed even more performance I would trick it out with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) option – but I doubt I will need to.  This still leaves me with an empty internal bay as well.

Can’t wait to get it all configured this way, I expect I will be able to run virtually unlimited tracks / plug-ins, etc.  Plus, if I run out of CPU room, I can always use my MacBook as a LogicNode!

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.