Bring Money

By Roger Nichols

AES 2003. A Gear-Slut convention if ever there was one. Comments are often overheard as you cruise the aisles, such as: “You only have 96 inputs at 96/24? How can you do anything?” “192kHz/32bit is almost where I want to be. It is just sounds too much like you are wearing a tee shirt that is one size too small.” “No, no. SATA is to FireWire what SCSI is to ATAPI, right?” “Are these hot dogs safe to eat?” “What the hell is ‘vintage-digital’?” “I think the future arrived yesterday.”

There is nothing like walking the aisles of AES bumping into people you haven’t seen since the last AES, carrying bags full of brochures they will never read, drooling over gear that is almost beyond perfection, talking on cell phones trying to convince their spouses that there is enough room on the credit card for a new SSL digital console.

It is also amazing that most of the sales guys pushing higher sample rates are over 50 and can’t hear above 10k anyway. But they have new software that will display on HD plasma displays, the sound your failing ears can’t hear with graphics your failing eyes can’t see. So everything is just fine.

Training

We are now at the point where software is so advanced that the documentation fills thousands of pages of text, and the index alone fills 200 pages. There are whole industries popping up to train users in the finer arts of everything. Pro Tools, Final Cut Pro, Maya, Digital Performer, Logic Audio, Sonic Solutions, Sadie, Avid, and Nuendo, just to name a few. Some of the courses consist of CD-ROM or on-line training and tutorials, while others are comprehensive training-center based operations where each student gets a full blown system to train on, with classes ranging from one day refreshers to 12 day comprehensive multi-instructor marathons. Whatever happened to, “This is stop, this is play, and push both of these at the same time to record.”

In my view it is always beneficial to learn as much as you can about the innermost workings of the systems you use. If it is a hardware console, knowing how sub-systems are connected makes it easier for you to avoid potential problems or work around a disaster. If it is a software based DAW, it is always good to know how the system deals with your audio files so that you can be sure that you have backed up everything before the hard disk is re-formatted or you move on to another studio. It used to be that you could pick up your multi-track tape and say, “All of my tracks are right here on this tape.” You can’t be sure any more.

By learning about digital systems I found out that digital copies made between 3M digital multi-tracks were not clones, and what came out of an Akai DD-1000 optical disk recorder was not exactly what you recorded into it. Upgrades were eventually made to both systems that cleared up these anomalies. Learning how your equipment works makes you a more credible authority when you have questions or complaints about how your equipment performs its assigned tasks.

When you recorded using a tape machine and a console, you had to learn to work within the parameters of the hardware. One EQ choice, hardware aux sends, and signal routing through hardware patches to outboard gear. If you want to use a UREI 1176 compressor on more than one channel, you have to buy or rent them. When you record using a software based system, you can change EQ by using a different plug-in, you can route anything to anywhere, and you are not limited to the hardware on hand. If you want to use a UREI 1176 on more than one channel, you just assign another copy of the plug-in.

Most of the Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) have been around for ten years now. The software is better, the resolution is higher, and the features are pretty much endless. There are at least three ways to perform any task within a DAW to allow different users to work in different ways. You can pull down a menu, use keyboard combinations, or press a button on a work surface. Everything is non-destructive and un-doable. It is almost impossible to get into a mess that you can’t get out of. I said almost.

Documentation

I get sessions from Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Nuendo, Cubase, and Logic Audio that I have to convert before mixing. There are always audio files missing. Sometimes the original studio can’t find them when I call because everything is named Audio-1, Audio-2, etc. Often I get sessions where the previous engineer has bounced audio to disc to consolidate tracks. Most of the time there is audio on the bounced track that does not belong there, like background vocals on the guitar bounce track. Most of the time I can deal with it, except when they are both happening at the same time and the artist does not want the backgrounds in that section.

Documentation that comes in with outside sessions is mostly non-existent. A hand written note saying that not all of the audio would fit on the CD-R, so the extra audio files are on the disc with another song. The second disc contains one folder named “audio files” and one named “Audio Files” and there is no telling which one went with which song.

These are some of the things we are trying to deal with at the P&E wing of NARAS. If you want to learn more about documenting a DAW session and what format to use as a delivery format to the record company after the project is done, then go to www.grammy.com and click on P&E WING.