Category: Recording

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Rants Recording Why ProTools Sucks

Why ProTools Sucks

I’ve added a new category: “Why ProTools Sucks.”

This section will be where I voice my opinion about Digidesign’s ProTools digital audio recording hardware/software. ProTools has become the industry standard in the recording world. It’s the buzz word everyone always knows.

But in my opinion there are many systems out there which can do what ProTools does, even better. Add that to the fact that you can get these systems for a fraction of what ProTools costs… Customer service? Yeah well i remember calling a 900 number for my ProTools questions, paying $3/minute, being on hold for 47 minutes and then getting asked “did you plug it in?” There goes $150 bucks… But if you have thousands of extra dollars to waste on an overpriced recording system, I guess you can pay $150 bucks to be on hold for 47 minutes.

CAN’T SELECT MULTIPLE MARKERS

I’m editing this book on CD. It’s a 350 page book where the author has read the entire thing. The author has a speech impediment and screws up constantly. So there are over 3000 markers in this ProTools project, each is an edit or fix that needs to be done.

I’ve got the book edited and now I need to get rid of most of the 3000 markers and put new ones in. So about 2800 of the markers need to be deleted. Should be easy, right? Just select a marker, hold down the shift key, then select the end of the group you want to delete….right? WRONG. You can’t select multiple markers in ProTools. You can delete ALL the markers, but you can’t say select 30 of them and delete them, leaving the rest.

I have the choice of deleting all 3000 markers, and losing the 200 I want to keep. Or I can delete 2800 markers, one at a time. Oh you can’t just hit the delete key when you have a marker selected either. You have to select the marker, then use a pull down menu to select “clear marker.” This process would take me close to 10,000 mouse clicks on this project. Is digidesign willing to pay my doctor bill for ligament damage which I’ll incur from clicking my mouse so many times?

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Recording Why ProTools Sucks

Coming soon: Digidesign ProTools LE & MBox Review

One of the gigs the big studio I’m at is doing right now is a book on tape or book on CD as the case may be. The guy reading has a lot of “issues” with his pronunciation and English skills.

So he’s read his entire book into three different ProTools sessions. Each session is at least 400 minutes. Each session also has about 1000 out-takes or flubs which need to be edited out.

I volunteered to edit the book, knowing that there was a lot of material and it would be a good gig for a while. They initially had someone else doing it but now they’ve given the edit to me.

So the studio bought a Digidesign MBox Pro, which comes with ProTools LE and I’ve got it set up in my living room. I’ve edited for three hours so far and I’m getting into the flow. It’s taking about an hour to edit 10 pages of the book and the book is 350 pages. I’m sure I’ll get faster and by the time I’m done with this sucker I’ll have my first evaluation and impressions of ProTools LE and the MBox on my Apple MacBook.

Stay tuned.

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Musicians Rants Recording

Learn how to play the friggin’ guitar

So I’m working into the rotation at the big studio. Right now I’m not getting the most “prestigious” gigs.

I’m working with a hack acoustic guitar player and I just can’t get his guitar to sound very crisp. I’ve got a friggin’ $8000 Neumann microphone on this guy’s guitar and it sounds terrible. No crispness at all. It sounds like the mic is across the room pointing the other direction.

I go in the sound booth to see what is up. Maybe the guy took his shoes off and hung his shoe on the mic?

All thumbs

As it turns out, this guy is paying $100/hour to record his acoustic tracks and he’s playing the guitar with the meat of his thumb. DOH! I asked “where’s your guitar pick?” and he says “I don’ t use one.” Hmm… I say “that’s probably why it doesn’t sound very crisp.”

Later in the session when I go to set up an auto-tuner on his vocals I ask the same guy what key the song is in. “I don’t know” is his answer. So I ask “what chord are you playing on the last note of the song?” “I don’t know” again. The guy is self taught, doesn’t use a guitar pick, and doesn’t know what a chord is. He was playing a bastardized G chord…

Normally I’d say “kill me” in this situation, but I’m glad to have a gig at this point so no worries. Just get a friggin’ guitar lesson before the next session please…

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Recording

Finished harp session

Today I was pretty much on my own. Started up with the harp client, finishing tracks and then mixing.

The chick’s harp sounded a little different. I started to wonder if my trims were the same as yesterday and while f’ing around with them I accidentally padded one half. The Euphonix console can be so deep with menus and hot keys I couldn’t figure out what the hell I did. The harp player and producer didn’t notice but I was in some trouble… One of two of the mics were working and if this chick nailed a take I’d have to figure out a way to compensate in the mix to make it sound like the other tracks.

Fortunately the harp player was struggling and I finally figured it out and got it working right. Later she did the another take of that tune which was much better… Other than that the session went perfect and the client left happy.

So I’m close to being able to run full sessions with no help. As I find a snag with ProTools (prodrools) or the studio setup, I figure it out. I only like to make mistakes once.
Harp Recording Session

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Recording

Figuring out how to get in the rotation

Like I said before, I’ve been a bit frustrated with getting in the rotation and actually “working” gigs in the studio. I’ve been sitting in a lot but not working or making any dough. The owner just works his ass off and doesn’t really offer me gigs. But I’m finding if I just show up he’s more than willing to just turn them over to me. That’s what happened today. It was a harp project, recording for the Suzuki instructional CD’s. He threw me on the console and went in the other room and did paperwork.

I worked that gig with only a couple of hiccups which require me to get help. Once I don’t need any help I’ll be able to do more gigs. That’s very soon. I’m finishing off that project tomorrow, on my own. I should be fine. Just doing some more tracking and mixing down. It will be my first gig in the big studio without my training wheels.