Cheshire Omnimedia

Earlier I posted about the rumor of a new plug-in for the SSL suite offered by Waves.

The G-Channel appears to be available for a paid upgrade of $153 for those that have a lapsed WUP.

This is all speculation, but I imagine if the sales/support people are talking about it over email with customers, it’s probably due in the next few months. I imagine this is Waves ammunition for the next AES in San Fransisco- though they’ve certainly been busy as of late with the JJP line.

Here’s the source:
http://www.gearslutz.com/

And my post at the Gearslutz new product section:
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/new-product-alert/

Breaking rumor: with waveshell 6.0 SSL users will get a “G” channel!

More details and speculation when I get back from the studio. Whoo hoo!

This Studio Moral of the Day is a handy no-brainer in ProTools that’ll help you manage your session.

Ever struggled at what to name a comped track after you comped it and are ready to consolidate? Or managed to have a playlist labeled .02 when it’s really take 3?

When you queue up a track for a vocal, think of the virgin track as your comp. As soon as you create it, go to a new playlist. Your Lead Vocal will now be labeled Lead Vocal.01, which should be interpreted as Take 1. This will help when your talking to the vocalist and she/he refers to take three. There’s less to think about, as you have take three as Lead Vocal.03. You comp to the Lead Vocal playlist, so there’s no need to make a Lead Vocal Comp playlist like I used to do.

It also makes your consolidation easier to read and manage in the region bin. (You’ll notice a trend in my last few Studio Morals!)

Today I’d like to take a look at a quote that gets bandied about quite a bit on the Internet. You see it as a signature in many of the online forums. Hell, even I had it printed out and posted on the main rack at the Dawghouse for all to see.

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
- Mis-attributed to Hunter S. Thompson

Now there’s a certain truth to it. We’ve all seen quite a few great artists get nowhere in the music business and quite a bit of mediocre talent get lauded for it’s genius. But that’s not the point that I’m hitting at right yet. It’s more-so the fact that Hunter S. Thompson never said it or wrote it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

The actual quote: (According to Wikiqoute)

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
- San Francisco Examiner (4 November 1985) HST

Now I think we’ll all agree that the music business is a pretty rough place. Even when everyone acts in good faith the intersection of Art and Commerce is tenuous at best.

The live business can be unending and dreary. A hurry-up-and-wait game that repeats daily. Venues start to blur together. Fast food becomes a habit as good food becomes scarce. Playing pirate can take it’s toll on the staff and the talent. Long days. Long roads.

The studio business ain’t much better. We bill like lawyers. There’s no paid vacation or bennies save for the top 1% of jobs, unless you’re in post. (Kidding. Sort of.) You eat what you kill. The glut of “engineers” from 1 and 2 year programs has the business in a race to the bottom.

And yet we still do it. We put in more hours and heart then almost any other profession. Sure there are tougher jobs, that’s no lie. But they get paid for it. Well. So why do we do it? I could put forth a tenth of the effort and live way more comfortably.

Because we love it.

Even when the good men die like dogs.

(I’d recommend checking out About.com’s Urban Legend Guide for more info on the HST quote.)

$trick 9 and the Truth

Here’s an artist that you might not be familiar with. I consider $trick 9 to be a good friend (and client- full disclosure.)

You should be familiar with him too. And here’s why: Whatever your opinion on his music/politics, you can’t question his marketing. (A point, his record Mother Earth rocks the casbah pretty hard!)

That’s something that many bands seem to short themselves on. They have great ideas and songs, but to become successful you have to get the word out.

And that’s why I love ‘Nine. He plays 4 tent-pole shows a year in his home town. They have a definite theme, (a winter formal, spring hootenanny, etc.) He and his band post a weekly video podcast, which is hilarious. Strickland also manages to get fliers anywhere and everywhere. You know that his show is coming.

Too often from other bands I get a call or an dispassionate email the day of. Get out there and promote yourselves! The club owner sure isn’t!

So today’s moral goes something like this: How do you exchange files between different programs and clients? Is there a fool proof way?

The answer is of course, yes. But getting there can be a bit of challenge.

Audio files are what makes the world go round regardless of what software you use. The idea is to consolidate your files, so that each track is one continuous file. You can then exchange the actual files without any session data (ie. .ptf) back and forth: everything stays in perfect sync.

Each DAW is different of course, and your particular DAW probably handles this function differently.

In Protools, you consolidate by highlighting the beginning of the track to the end and selecting “consolidate” from the edit menu. It’ll fill the blank region space with silence. However many edits you’ve done will be made into one big file. You will want to do this with every track. (You should label each track before consolidating, as in PT it’ll name the new audio file after the track name.) In the Audio Files directory you’ll find the newly created files.

Other programs have similar things. In Cubase it’s necessary to put a silent audio clip at the beginning and end of the track.
All of the files should have the same length and be the same size in the file browser. This also, coincidentally, is the same as the NARAS P&E guidelines for archiving projects.

There’s the whole business of OMF interchange, and while reasonable, I’ve found the best practice is to consolidate and ship. There’s no ambiguity then, and every DAW should be able to support it.