Category — Music

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!

Around The Block.mp3

I added a little instrumentation and remixed this years-old Acid track in Logic Pro.  Used the opportunity to learn about FX automation (note the vocal delays) – so it was a good learning experience. 

How Do I Get Through.mp3

This was an experiment I did last weekend.  Jon Mellen and I modified the lyrics and music to one of his tunes, just coming up with a verse and a chorus.  We then recorded it over a piano and a click.

I then used Logic 8 and an assortment of plugins and virtual instruments to test a full production.  Turned out ok, considering it’s the first time doing this on the Mac and with Logic.

I did get to use some cool tools while doing this, including:

• Softube’s Amp Room (on rhythm guitars) and Acoustic Feedback (on the lead guitar)
• Steinberg’s Virtual Guitarist 2 (acoustic guitars)

If we were going to finish this, we’d obviously write a couple of more verses, but you get the idea.  Repetitive, but hey, it was a test project.

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.