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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.
May Day, Mayday!
by Roger Nichols
As I pen this column I am at 1,700 feet up the side of Haleakala on the island
of Maui looking out the window of the studio where the cows and turkeys are
helping me enjoy the view of Molokini, Lanai and Kahoolawe.
The studio we are using has a pair of Sony digital multi-tracks, a nice recording
room, and great microphones, but the console is an old Soundtracs IL4832 analog
console. What is a digital-kind-of-guy to do? If the island won’t come
to my ProTools, then I guess ProTools has to go to the island. It worked for
Mohamed and the mountain!
The task was to bring everything needed to record, overdub and mix and stay
digital at 48kHz, 24bits. ProTools 5.1 was the choice for this task…
mostly. The producer from Japan bought a new ProTools 24|Mix Plus system with
two additional Mix Farms, a 7 slot expansion chassis, a new G4 Mac computer
with ATTO SCSI accelerator card and Cinema Display, two Apogee AD8000 interfaces,
two Digidesign 34gig Silent Drives, tcWorks plug-in bundle, Waves Gold bundle,
Autotune, and a plethora of AcroTec 99.9999% pure copper high-end analog cables
for getting the audio into the mic preamps and AD8000s.
I was making a list of equipment I needed to bring to round out the recording
hardware. Just when I thought I could fit everything I needed into one bag,
I got a call from the producer. There is no acoustic piano at the studio,
and nobody wanted to rent us a piano and haul it halfway around the island
for one week of use. Rats. I suggested that we find a good piano on the island
in someone’s house or restaurant and record it as a remote recording.
The studio manager found a nine-foot Steinway in a brand new home owned by
a classical organist. He said that if we paid for the tuning that we could
record the piano. The studio plans were finalized and we were going to Maui.
I started packing the necessary equipment for the trip. My Digidesign USD,
888/24 interface, ProControl, tc6000 reverb, Precision Audio True 8 mic preamp,
Valley Audio Dynamax 730 limiter, two Maxtor 80gig FireWire drives for sound
file backup, four Shure KSM32 microphones, two Shure KSM44 microphones, and
a pair of Beyer Dynamic digital microphones. I thought about the remote recording
and decided that since we were recording in ProTools, I would use my Powerbook
Ti G4/500 laptop fitted with the Digigram VXPocket card and Logic Audio so
that the piano could be easily dropped back into the recordings done at the
studio. I am ready.
Don “Cruisin’ For A Bruisin’” Grusin was “Anchor
Man” for the sessions. He had done the pre-production work at his studio
using Logic Audio with beta versions of their new soft-synths. He was going
to bring all the files and copy protection dongles, and we were going to install
everything on the Mac 9600 at the studio. I love technology.
The First Days
I scheduled two days in the studio prior to the first tracking day to get
everything working correctly in the new room with the new computers. The first
day was for me and the ProTools recording setup. We turned off the Soundtrac
console and placed a foam pad over the knobs on the console so we could place
the ProControl on the console. The Meyer HD-1 speakers would stay where they
were on the Soundtrac meter bridge. The Apple Cinema Display was positioned
between the speakers. The G4 and the hard disks were placed on the floor behind
the console to minimize the noise pollution. All connections for monitoring
and talkback were made through the ProControl directly to the powered speakers.
The AD8000s were placed to the side of the console for better access from
the GML and Mellennia HV-3D mic preamps.
All of the ProTools parts were assembled and cables run back and forth across
the control room floor. The ProControl has DB-25 connectors on the rear panel
for analog audio I/O. Tascam format snakes were used to get the audio in from
the AD8000 playback and cue mix feeds. The biggest problem was cable lengths.
If the AD8000s were close to the computer, then the cables from the mic preamps
to the AD8000 inputs would not reach. The tc6000 was placed so that the digital
interface connected to the 888/24. By the end of the first day everything
was working. Recording, playing back… what more could you ask?
Day two was for Don to get his Logic Audio software with EVP88 virtual synth
and EXS24 virtual sampler software loaded on the studio computer. The studio
computer was a Mac 9600/300, which should have been fine for the task. After
lengthy installation of software with copy protection authorizations and dongles,
we discovered that the computer did not have enough memory to run the required
plug-ins. It turns out that memory for the 9600 runs about $250 for 64 megabytes,
while for the G4 memory is about $120 for 512 megabytes. We did not want to
buy lots of memory for a computer with a limited use expectancy, but we needed
the audio files out of the virtual synthesizer modules. We found 64-megabyte
memory modules at the local computer store and popped it in the computer.
Soon we discovered that the 64 megabytes was not enough either. We were originally
planning to lock the MIDI computer to the ProTools computer so they could
run in parallel, but it was not to be. We then tried to load the MIDI software
on one of the laptops, but that didn’t work out either. We ended up with
all of the MIDI software on the same G4 as the ProTools system. We ran Logic
Audio, printed the audio from the virtual synths, and then importing the audio
files to ProTools. This process took a week to figure out while we were cutting
tracks. Oh well.
Recording
The studio has Mytek monitor mix systems so that each musician can have his
own mix. I just had to patch an analog output from the bass, guitar, and keyboard
directly to knobs on the Mytek, and send a stereo mix of the drums. Headphone
mix… done.
We recorded directly into ProTools at 48k 24 bits. I know a lot of you do
this every day, and I have to, but there is an extra ‘pucker factor’
when you have flown Sonny Emory, Abe Laboriel, and John McFee to Maui for
a week to cut tracks. They are too booked up to stay over and there is no
place to get parts if something crashes. FedEx takes two days to Maui.
I was recording everything flat into ProTools and setting EQ for monitoring
(and later mixing.) After the first song was finished, I saved a version of
the song with no audio, just the empty tracks with EQ, cue mixes, and Aux
returns for the tc6000. For the balance of the 14 songs I just copied the
session document, renamed it for the new song, and made sure the disk allocation
was going to the correct folder. Half of my work was done.
We set a record for all of us. 14 songs… one take each. What the hell
is that! I wanted to fill up the hard disks, not take them back empty. They
listened to the demo, followed along on the chart, went out to the studio
room, recorded one take, came back in, listened, and that was it. On three
songs we had to punch-in a bass note, or a guitar chord, but that was it.
Is there a Grammy for recording a whole album in one take?
Laptop Time
After tracks we needed to do the remote recording of the piano. Armed with
a G4/500 laptop, microphones and the slave mixes of the six songs we needed,
we traveled to an amazing house on the slopes of Maui with a central room
dedicated to a piano and an Allen digital cathedral four manual pipe organ.
The entire front of the house was glass from the floor to the 18-foot ceiling.
The piano sounded great, but the view was fantastic. Three whales breached
while we were doing the overdubs.
Logic Audio 4.70 on the laptop with a Digigram VXPocket captured the recordings.
Shure KSM32s through a True Audio Precision Eight mic preamp. Headphones were
fed from a Rane headphone amp. The VXPocket was set for loop through monitoring
to avoid latency problems. Everything worked fine. We got the six songs done,
went back to the studio and imported the audio into the original ProTools
session and went back to work.
Wrap Up
That’s where I am right now. Sorting out piano tracks and deciding what
to use and what not to use. We still have vocals and some keyboard overdubs
to do, and then of course, the mixing. Mixing will be done in ProTools using
plug-ins and the ProControl for fader moves. I hate riding vocals with a mouse.
By the time you read this I will be done mixing and it will be time for a
sunny vacation in Miami. Oh, well. Somebody’s gotta do it.