Pro Sound Blog

Blogging live at the gig with my iphone

Oh my god the opening band started with a Motley Crue song and now they’re playing Sweet Child of Mine by Guns and Roses. OMFG they’re playing Jackyl now.

Kill me

Oh now I find out we have no bass player. We’re going to try and get out of this gig and see if the 3rd band will just play longer. I’d rather go home and eat rice crispy treats anyway.

I’m doing a benefit gig tonight. The beneficiary is this local kid who was injured when an illegal bomb his neighbor was building exploded. Nice.

I hope we can raise some bucks to help this kid with his medical bills.

Man have you listened to today’s hip hop and top 40? Every damn artist has that “robotic Cher Autotune” sound. Good news, there’s a new version of Autotune.

With even more features like graphic representation of the notes (like Melodyne), vocalists who suck can now suck less.

Soon somebody will come out with a plugin which not only tunes the vocals, it writes the lyrics and performs them. Then the need for a vocalist will be eliminated. Since everyone lipsyncs these days anyway, they could just find the best looking “dancer” they can and stick them on stage to fake their parts.

Last week I played an awesome show at a bar which was formerly very smoky. The bar changed their policies and are banning smoking, about 8 months before a new law here goes into effect. That made playing much better as I wasn’t breathing smoke and I didn’t smell like smoke when I got home.

The other great part about this show was that my former bass player of 20+ years was in town and played the gig. The new girl bass player watched from the audience as we rocked very hard and fast. I was so pumped I never fatigued at all, despite not playing for close to 5-6 months. Even though I had blisters on my thumbs I didn’t care.

Not gigging

That being said, I’ve concluded that I do not wish to gig again unless the following happens:

1. My old bass player is there, not the girl.
2. There is no smoke.

So as it sits, I’m taking a sabbatical. I was in one anyway. My bass player may come back into town some day and at that point I’ll consider playing again. But until then, I can’t stand gigging with this girl. She’s nice, but she’s only learned about 1/6th of the song list and only half-assed at that. Plus, she just doesn’t “rock.” I know that sounds funny but it is the only way I can put it into words. If I can’t rock at a rock & roll show, I might as well stay home.

Reason #7 ProTools sucks? Plug-ins cost more.

Say you find a plug for VST or other systems which runs around $200.
The same exact TDM plug for ProDrools would cost about $500.

I’m in Palm Springs in the press room covering a golf tournament. Next door the Charley Daniels band is doing their sound check. Kick drum, kick drum, fiddle, fiddle, bass, keys, and then it happened…

The guitar player started playing. The tone was perfect. The notes were perfect. He was playing “Circumstances” by Rush.

Man I’m tired. 8-12 hours per day for about a week on drum tracks. We had 18 microphones on the drums, including Neumann U87’s on the overheads… Hell of a set up.

After drums it was bass tracks for 2.5 days. The stress level was high because the client was considerably over budget by this point. The takes were tough because the music is so difficult added to the fact that they wanted to finish fast.

Yesterday saw the completion of the bass tracks and now we assemble the double album’s “chunks” into actual pieces. Just doing this is going to take 2-3 days.

I can’t type anymore. Must…sleep.

I just converted a session from ProTools to Cubase. I had to convert the files from 24-bit (ProTools) to 32-bit (Cubase). Seems odd I’d have to “upgrade” my audio files to go from an insanely expensive and industry standard system costing thousands of bucks, in order to work with a program that retails for $799.

Do you have any idea how much of a headroom difference there is between 24-bit and 32-bit recording? It’s huge.

Steinberg’s Cubase and Nuendo can record 32-bit and they cost from $199-$2,000.
ProTools maxes out at 24-bit and can cost tens of thousands of $$$.

Reason #6 ProTools sucks? The cost per bit!

In the Mac operating system, hitting the tab key while in an open or save dialog box tabs you through to the filename and highlights it. So say you want to save a new file, you hit save as and then a save dialog pops up. If you hit tab, the file name becomes active and highlighted and you just start typing your filename.

This function is a time saver, especially if you deal with a lot of files. In ProDrools, this doesn’t happen. Tab does nothing. But ProTools isn’t about saving time, it’s about taking MORE time, so your big expensive studio can bill your client more hours and make more money, thus helping you afford your overpriced recording system.

If you have ProTools running (I’m on the Mac OS by the way), hooking up any kind of drive results in a pain in the ass.

Let’s say you’re working in a ProTools project and your daughter comes in and needs you to print something off of some flash drive or portable drive she brought in from a computer at school or something. You leave the PT environment and print the document. Then you try to eject the drive, but you can’t. It’s in use by ProTools. You then have to go into ProDrools, go to the “workspace” drop down menu, and then select about the 50th menu selection down called “unmount.”

Upon inspection of this drive you had to “unmount” there is a new folder on there called “Digidesign Databases.” I didn’t f’ing ask ProDrools to put a damn thing on this drive. I didn’t tell ProDrools that this drive was going to ever be used for any sort of project.

ProTools owns every drive you hook up to your system while it is running, whether you want it to or not.