Cheshire Omnimedia

Just a quick note: I’m in Vegas! Whoo hoo! More studio thoughts to come soon.

Last night over beer a buddy was asking me about the general “stages” of recording. After a bit I started to think about the first step I had told him: Pre-Production.

Prepro is probably the easiest to underestimate in the recording process. It took me quite a few sessions to figure that out as there’s not the clear cut path to follow in my market as far as learning the ropes.

Let’s look at the basic premise of prepro: the producers of the project (bands, producers, engineers) talk over what they hope to end with and how they’re going to achieve it. Will everybody play together at the same time? Is everybody rehearsed, songs selected? Budget? Studio? Schedule?Deliverables? Click track? Rental gear? Do instruments need some tlc from a tech? Etc etc.

At a home studio or pro room ( or any combo of the two ) this simple process is the key to many problems that usually come up later.

It’s a painful lesson to learn, but once you get in the mode of planning, the sessions go sooooo much better. There’s quite a bit less drama in the studio with this short meeting.

Here’s a quick look at what your backup directory should look like. Note the date convention: year, month, day.

Just a quick reminder for today’s Studio Moral of the Day: Only you can prevent forest fires.

I mean, actually, that only you can say no to Quicktime. Updates that is. I should have listened to my own advice.

The other day I was having troubles on my PC with the transport stopping as soon as I press play. It’d backqueue a few milliseconds, and then stall out. After a few attempts, it’d let you play. Further exploration revealed that I was in AIFF as opposed to WAV. (More on why I prefer BWAV over AIFF in a later SMotD.)

I presume that the side grade to a non-standard QT release is what did me. Transcoding for a music video is what got me, I think.

Today’s post is an obit for Gigastudio. I’ve been running GS 2.5 on a standalone PC for a number of years now. It’s been a real workhorse here, so I’m kind of sad to see it go. This is from Tascam so it’s not too suprising. (The old joke goes you can’t spell Tascam without scam!)

I’ve worked with a few other soft-samplers for Protools and they all seem to be a bit buggy. Native Instruments pianos sound great, but can really flake out. (Using a Mac for my experience here.) I know it seems old fashioned, but the standalone thing worked really well. I ran two midi cables to my Giga machine, and ran a light-pipe back into PT. Lovely! Pretty low latency, and Giga rarely messed up once you got it going. Great sample sets. The first samples I’ve heard that can pass as “real.”

I remember cutting the Twistin’ Trees album. I originally recorded all of the piano tracks late at night on a concert length Steinway. It sounded simply amazing. . . until I got the tracks back on monitors and realized a few key notes were out of tune. I recut everything via midi through Gigapiano (the included one with GS 2) It sounded GREAT! The mastering engineer asked where I cut the piano. I was sold at that point.

A few caveats of course. I’ve never been able to register my software, despite trying the several times I’ve reinstalled over the years. Another is that on one particular mobo I couldn’t get the midi inputs to show up in the sampler. Everything was greyed out. No matter what voodoo I tried, no luck. I had to reinstall windows from the ground up, and it worked. The sample editor (if you’re really trying to make a GS “instrument”) is an absolute pain in the butt. I’d rather code something in assembly (note: I don’t know anything about assembly.)

Flaws included, I look back with fond memories. Of course, I’ll keep using the version I have, but now I’ll never get to know GS 3, and certainly not the short lived 4.

(Pouring coffee onto floor) Here’s one for my homie:

Giga, I hardly knew thee!

Quick update: my LaCie doesn’t seem to have the same problem when I’m not using PT. I think it’s still a controller issue, but the drive might not be pwnd per se.

Looking around on the web reveals that more and more D2’s are starting to die en masse.  I’d still steer clear.