Category — My Studio

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.

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…

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.