by Enormous on April 27, 2009
Here is some advice for all you budding audio engineers and DAW recordists out there: if you are working on a track with tempo changes make sure they are all correct before doing any overdubs.
I have been working on a project over the weekend that features several specific timing variations. I realised, after the whole track was nearly finished, that some of the tempo changes were almost, but not quite, exactly different to the way they were supposed to be.
Oh, what joy I felt when it dawned on me that after correcting them, everything else on the track would be out of synch. (Yes, I know I could have tried warping and time-stretching some of the audio, but, trust me, it wouldn’t work.)
Sometimes, when it hits you with depressing realisation that everything you have been working on for two days needs re-recording, you feel ever so slightly like giving up.
In fact I did. I spent the whole of yesterday with Audrey and two cold bottles of Chardonnay sitting upstairs at the control-room window watching the local twenty-six-stone spheroid women of lively odours and obliging virtue as they waddled by on the rain-soaked streets below.
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by Enormous on March 26, 2007
I’ve just bought a new air ionizer for the studio and it’s brilliant.
Ionizers reduce the amount of positively-charged molecules – ions – in the air that lots of electrical equipment such as one might find in a recording studio can produce. These positively-charged ions are converted into negatively-charged ions such as one might encounter in a very clean outdoor environment – when out hill-walking in Switzerland, for example.
The ionizer we used to have here at Big Arena Studios was quite small and probably not fully up to the job; but this new one – wow, what a monster! Sat here in front of the mixing desk, I feel absolutely wonderful. Gone is the static, enervating atmosphere that we used to have to endure. It has now been replaced by a refreshing and invigorating ambience that just makes you feel great. (What is slightly concerning though is the apparent aphrodisiac effects it produces – one is pretty much permanently at half-mast during a session now, which doesn’t really worry me if I’m mixing some egregious heavy metal rubbish, but if I’ve got a pretty girl band booked in I may have to turn it off.)
And I can’t get Audrey out of the control room, either. She just growls at me uncharacteristically if I try to nudge her into the garden.
But overall, Big Arena’s new acquisition just makes you want to go on forever . . . you just don’t get tired or feel morose at any point during a session – even during the early hours when everybody is beginning to emit unfortunate odours and fruit flies are gathering on the monitors.
I can highly recommend these handy little machines and I am now looking forward to clients booking the studio for longer periods. It also means I can get more work out of my cute little engineers. Ha-ha! Work, you slaves!
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