April 2004
Saturday April 27
1:57 AM
Began a project with guitarist Steve Anderson tonight. He brought his Roland VS480 multitrack to Sound Vortex, and we loaded tracks recorded at his home into Pro Tools. That thing actually stores and reads data with Zip disks; there's no internal hard drive. Zip disks, for god's sake. We slaved Pro Tools to MIDI timecode generated from the 480, and it actually worked quite well. Next step will be to build on the existing pieces; we're currently thinking some percussion, fretless electric bass, long pad sweeps.
Robb and I had originally planned to go see Max Vague tonight, but after an evening of loading tracks in real time, we cancelled it.
Thursday, April 15
From the corporate audio production world:
I thought of a solution to a problem. Always good...probably not original, but it will most definitely prevent future loss of time.
The Scenario: We have a thirty minute long script. The narration has been edited, there is music underneath, and we need to bounce it out as a stereo file to make an audio CD. One could simply record directly to a CD recorder, but we don't want to waste (admittedly cheap) blank CD's in case there is an edit point we either overlooked or slept through, in which case we'd have to stop the recording, fix the voicetrack, discard the partially burned disc and start over at the beginning. If the overlooked edit point occured, say, twenty-five minutes into the program, that would add up to around thirty minutes of completely wasted (and non-billable) time, and unfair burden for the client.
The Solution: In Pro Tools, create a stereo submaster, insert "finalizing" plugin of choice (e.g. Waves L1), and feed it voice and music tracks. Then create a new stereo track, receiving the output of the submaster. Arm the new stereo track, and start recording.
Then, if an overlooked edit point goes by, simply stop recording, make the corrections, and begin recording on the new stereo track again, starting a little way before the point where you'd stopped, for editing purposes. After the new stereo track of the entire program is done, make the edit back where you had to stop it the first time. Then Consolidate the regions. You will now have a seamless stereo pair of files, of the entire program. Select the pair, and Export Region as File, whereupon you specify 16bit, 44.1, stereo interleaved.
Voila... you can then burn your CD, with very minimum time lost due to your having slept through an edit point, or missed because you were dying to get the hell out of there and go drink and watch the NHL playoffs.
Sunday April 10
10:30PM Sound Vortex
-Mezzo is happy now. Had to trash (or rename) Mezzo's database folder, then restart. Don't start it with a disc in the DVD drive. Backed up a client's session spanning three days. Mezzo is happening.
-Sync'd Pro Tools to analog multitrack. Dumped tracks in, sync'd to play.
Edited the multitrack performance, will soon add tracks to analog.
The Sync I/O is happening. Life is good.
Monday, April 5th
Complete the following sentence:
Had it not been for ______,
I probably would have ______.
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