audiot

yeah, finally a real entry again :-)

before i’m starting with this, remember that i’m not a professional sound engineer, technician, producing great or anything related. so the following ain’t written in stone, it’s just what i found out during my creative journey so far. your experience may differ, maybe some of this is plain wrong. so just think of it as ideas or theories and we’ll be fine.

i would like to divide this “cleaning up”-topic into 4 parts. and this entry is, oddly enough, about part 1 :-)

this first one is kind of a no-brainer, at least it should be – so i’ll make it brief. because it really is about cleaning up. cleaning up your studio aka workspace that is. simple as that. you might think ‘what the hell is he talking about?’ but there’s a reason why there’s a huge industry dedicated only to the task of organizing workspaces. there’s a reason for pocket-calendars and filofaxes, flipcharts and magnetic boards, post-it-thingies and different colored markers, lots and lots of software applications helping to keep track of it all.

well, i’m not that much into all those little helpers – i prefer to rely on my brain, even if this sometimes is quite a challenge depending on the number of things to remember and the current state of mind i’m in, but let’s not go there… did you ever see someone freak out in wild panic because he/she lost his ___________________ (fill in name of little helper)?

anyway, this here is just about keeping your studio clean and tidy. and don’t you ever underestimate the importance of this! i’m not writing this for those guys who think they need their creative chaos with pizza-slices (already green and shiny on top) lying around, piles of all sorts of cables on the floor – some working, some not – and so forth. those people might as well make their music on a dump. it doesn’t have to look pretty, it needs to be well-organized and working for you. so take the time to once and for all sort out the cables that don’t work etc. – get a bunch of boxes, draws, whatever to put spareparts, screws, tools, plugs, adapters and so forth in. find a way to organize cables, hang them on the wall for instance. i guess you can see what i’m getting at. you should also wire up the pieces of equipment you use regularly and keep it that way.

for example, i have two modeling devices to record guitar with. so they’re both connected to an audio-interface with the usb/firewire-cable already standing by as well as the guitar cable. and they’re both connected to a midi-interface for faster and easier sound-programming through the computer and this doesn’t change. when i want to track guitar or bass, all i have to do is plug in the instrument and the laptop and that’s it. as soon as the new studio is finished (which might be a while…), the audio interface will be wired at all times to the desktop mac as well. and to continue the guitar-example, the picks, slides, string cleaner, spare strings are at arm’s length as well as the guitar stand with the instrument i use the most. so it’s all right there where i need it, when i need it. including the sounds. i once took the time to program a whole bunch of guitar and bass sounds that i now use almost exclusively. they’re all versatile and can be shaped after the tracking with dynamic effects etc. there’s also a di-box standing by in case i want to do some tracks that can be reamped later. this all might sound a bit complicated, but that’s only my crappy english. in fact, i set this up once and now i’m always ready to record guitar and bass whenever i freaking want to. so you see, this goes hand in hand with the workflow ideas i wrote about in this earlier entry. but it’s not the same. this one here really is about a clean and tidy workspace. so take the vacuum cleaner every once in a while ;-) and get some dustcovers for your equipment. it’s a lot more fun to work on gear that’s clean and looks as if it’s brandnew.

another aspect of this is the way you organize your stuff inside your computer. i strongly recommend you create a template that you can use for any song or projet you’re working on. this takes a few minutes once and will save you hours later. just create a folder that you can name after the song later. inside of it, create other folders for audio samples, instrument tracks, effect patches, backup songfiles….. whatever you need and always save the single files in the right place. you might want to invent your own system of naming files, so you can see at once if a file is really used or just standing by as a donor of pieces if necessary. and of course, have a working system to backup your stuff up and running that you use at all times. after each and every session i save everything at least three times to different locations, so each location has the same status – always.

this part of the work is kind of boring and not as much fun as the actual writing or playing of course. but having a working system that keeps everything cleaned up, organized and perfectly accessible at any time makes this as efficient as it gets and gives you more time for the music.

to be continued…

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well, this entry is not meant as a guideline or a review or something similar. it’s more like some thoughts about gear needed to do some decent recording.

when i first got into recording i was somewhere around the age of 15 and a friend of mine asked for my help with some tunes he wanted to do. he was a techno-fan back then (ugh), had lots of equipment from an Atari ST (yay!) to multiple synths and samplers – things that were needed back then. he knew how to use these things but had no idea about music, some kind of techie one might say. so he wanted me to do the other half. anyhoo, today i sometimes think about those ridiculous amounts of gear filling whole rooms and causing nothing but trouble. we usually spent one half hour creating music and 5 hours solving technical problems, what a nightmare.

and nowadays the world is more complex, we’re not far away from fridges that only let us open their door if we haven’t crossed our personal calory-barrier for the day and already use wordprocessing software that patronizes us beyond belief. but who would have thought that recording music would be so much easier almost twenty years later than above mentioned teen-memory. certainly, the need for know-how hasn’t vanished (and in my opinion that’s a good thing), there are however lots of people who underestimate this. probably because the very process of producing music has become so much simpler.

back then, to record a standard band setup, you would have needed lots of microphones, at least one guitar amp, one bass amp, a mixing console, maybe preamps for the mics, compressors, gates, maybe expanders, reverbs, other effects – and i haven’t even talked about the actual recording device yet… today you need a laptop and some software – and if you’re really going at it, two mics, a midi controller and an interface. that’s it. no more need for large spaces, no more need to wait until your neighbors are not home. of course, more gear can be helpful in terms of streamlining or more possibilities, but let’s face it, with a good laptop and a program like Reason, you can achieve results far better than even some professional productions from 10-20 years ago.

so how does my setup look like? right now, it’s much more gear than necessary – simply because i piled up stuff during the last decade when those things were still needed. some of it will have to go, but some items will stay, for i use them not only to record but maybe to play live or for other non-recording-reasons. and i’m afraid i couldn’t even list all of it without doing some archeological excavation first….

but i can list my future setup which will be complete before the end of this year:

1. one of them new aluminium macbooks, yummy
2. Reason 4
3. a Motu 828 audio interface
4. some new Ultrasone headphones
5. and some new nearfield monitors, not sure which ones yet…
6. - 759. all the stuff that’s lying around here and that i use occasionally

but almost all of the work is done with the first two pieces (and some listening-device).

the only question left is what do i do with the extra space?