Cheshire Omnimedia

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.

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.

I suspect that Lacie’s QC or design team has gone the way of the Dodo. I’ve been fighting my Protools setup constantly today.

The culprit? I believe it’s the enclosure to one of my quadra 500 gig drives. During heavy use (such as batch exporting) the drive will “disappear.” Power’s still on (the Lacie support people will always blame this first. As if the power supply is the root of everything that can go wrong with their drives.)

Now I’m backed up (See this tip) so I’m not sweating bullets, but you do lose a few hours of productivity if a drive goes down.

My chain, for anyone who runs into this in the future: Dell E1705 ->Digi002R -> 500gig Lacie Quadra -> (Via FW800) 500gig Lacie Quadra.

My $.02: Avoid Lacie like the plague. A studio I work for lost one three weeks ago and then another started limping the other day. Combined with today’s experience, do yourself a favor. Skip Lacie all together.

If you’re reading the title and thinking What the hell does this have to do with audio? you’re right to be confused.

The other day I was recording a client and we got to the point of “well, I played a note, can’t you just make it longer?” Of course I can. But why should I?

Which brings me to my point:

If you want Brandon Lee in your film right now, you better be ready with wide pockets to cut a check to ILM as he’s sadly no longer, well, hireable. They have a whole slew of tricks to put the deceaseds’ likeness in celluloid.

But let’s say you have Hugh Grant in your film. Why not just film another take?

And that’s the crux of my idea today. We as engineers have crazy tools. It seems like magic to “mere mortals.” And it really is- we can change pitch, length, timing with some effort.

But if we don’t have to, why not just run another take?

So today I was updating the studio comp to the Waveshell 6.0 and it came time to pay the piper. The studio WUP license update was about $100. Not too bad, you might think. But there’s a few catch-ya’s.

1) You have to re-up everything. Not just the Waves SSL license, but everything has to be 6.0. According to the info when you go to update, anyway.

2) The studio’s fee was in the ball park of $180 as we also had to move our Renn Suite up to 6.0. My personal fee, as I have my own license, is $180. For the SSL alone. Total pain going to Waves for me to go G-Channel: $210.

I had heard that Waves was going to a $200 flat fee maximum for WUP. I was sadly mistaken. It’s $200 per bundle. Too bad that means my Musicians II is separate from the SSL Suite. (Though I shouldn’t complain, as I bought Musicians II for $40 based on apparent fluke pricing direct from Waves.)

Why the difference for the studio and me on the standalone cost? I was an original adopter for the SSL suite. Literally the first week it was out I had it running on my personal rig.

Ahhhh. . . the burden of being the first kid on the block.

I’m not Anti-WUP like many people. The change in Waves pricing strategy recently is very welcome as you used to have to pay quite a bit more for WUP. And I like (relatively) inexpensive upgrade paths.

But I still like to complain when it comes to hard earned $$$.