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.

It was a loooong day, 12 hours or so. We were going to start the downbeat at noon, but didn’t really get started till quite a while later. There were still tweaks to do on the levels as expected, but the drummer wasn’t tuned. He was going to get there early and be ready by noon but he wasn’t. That increased the stress level of his band mates because they have a set budget and amount of time and they can’t go over it.

Rule #1 of recording is that it always takes longer than you expect.

Crappy drummer

The drummer is fast as hell. He’s got some definite speed and skills. The reason I say crappy drummer, is that this guy is way into eating about 4075% more fiber per day than the human body is designed to take. Therefore this guy has to go take a shit seemingly between every take. At about $100/hour for this studio those are some expensive logs.

Ear fatigue

I’ve really got to take it easy with the volume. I haven’t done sessions like this for a few years and now that I’m a bit “older” I can’t take the loud levels for 12 straight hours like I used to. I need to have all these guys on headphones and keep the control room levels down. That way they can have it as loud as they want without hurting my ears any more than the decades of recording I’ve done already have.

The protools 7.4 rig started to gag later in the evening as well, leading me to the following post after this, why protools sucks #4, #5 and possibly #6.

Tonight I just completed the setup for the big double album technical rock band 1.5 month project. Now I know it is likely that some of these band members I’m working with will be reading my journals here, so be warned not to take any of it too deeply. It’s all in fun… maybe.

The setup went fairly well with a few problems due to the drummer.

First the drummer was late because his dog was “pissing diarrhea blood out it’s ass” and his wife was puking because she was pregnant and couldn’t smell it. Man I couldn’t imagine the hell that guy is going through (not with the dog, with having a pregnant wife).

2nd the drummer’s setup is enormous. He must have literally 20 cymbals. Don’t forget the rototoms and octobans. His kit is so tightly set up, there’s almost nowhere to get the mics into place. Before he could set his kit up he had to vacuum his carpet (see picture)! Believe it or not, that’s happened more times than I can count. Anal drummers… Can’t live with them, can’t kill them.

I haven’t worked in this studio for a few months. It was an experience for me trying to remember how the studio’s patching from room to room was setup, along with remembering the basic functions of the Euphonix console. The main owner/engineer was there to help, which was very good.

One of the tasks before we can record was to figure out how to get all the keyboard tracks into ProTools (or ProDrools as I prefer to call it). The keyboard player, bless his heart, doesn’t know much about what he’s doing. He didn’t even know what or if he had an audio interface with his Apple Logic Express system. He didn’t.

When importing the midi files, the individual takes or chunks were all broken up into separate tracks by ProDrools. I figured that I had to use a merge function in logic to merge each track individually first, before importing into PT. I’m not sure if Cubase is the same, but maybe that’s an entry #3 for my section called “why protools sucks.”

The setup took almost 6 hours, protools issues and drummers included. Tomorrow we start at high noon with the tracking of drums and bass. Noon is pretty late for me. The guys in the band have been complaining a bit about the schedule and not having enough days booked in May/June, yet they want to start at noon. If we started at 9am each day instead of noon, we’d gain one of those precious days back every three…

Off to bed.

Here’s a blog post about a cool waterproof case made by OtterBox. These are great for storing professional audio or video or small high tech items.

An audio engineer could fit several microphones, digital recorders or other stuff in this case to protect them from dust or moisture.