Monthly Archives: September 2010

As long as I gets a little “golden power”

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Apologies to Frank Zappa for the title of the post, but I couldn’t resist.

I got a new garage door opener a couple weeks ago, and it came with a 9-volt battery. I appreciate it when the batteries are included, but in this case I had to chuckle. Yes, it was a strange and wonderful off-brand battery called “Golden Power” direct from China, apparently.

Probably won't last an hour (on the tower of power)

It reminded me of a recent conversation with my pal Jay, who sings in Skinny Moo. He was talking about writing a book that would profile generic brand items and either recommend them (to save money) or warn you not to use them (because their quality is crappy).

One of the inspirations for his idea came from some off-brand batteries that he was using for his in-ear monitors. The monitors allow him to hear his vocals and the rest of the band while performing, and there’s nothing quite like being in the middle of a song and having the sound just disappear. Normally a Duracell or Energizer battery will last for several 4+ hour gigs.  The generic battery crapped out after about 15 minutes.

So Jay, this golden power’s for you, and for anyone else who uses lots of batteries. My recommendation: trash the off-brand battery and go with a name brand.

CALIbrAt: An ADAT odyssey (part 2)

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When I last wrote about transferring some audio from old ADAT tapes to Pro Tools, I had gone through an unexpected amount of hassle.  Instead of putting a tape into the ADAT machine and pressing play, I had to go through extensive, tape-destroying calibration along with disassembly and cleaning of the machine.

I spent the time to take care of all of that and get the ADAT working correctly again, only to find that the audio piped into Pro Tools was overwhelmed with digital noise.

So, picking up where I left off, I went out a few days after the initial extravaganza and got myself a couple new optical cables.  They’re not cheap, but hopefully these will be the last ones I have to buy for some time.  Since I invested in new cabling, the time is about right, of course, that I find my other good set which had gone missing at the time of the original calibration and cleaning.

The final piece of the puzzle

I made the connection between my PT interface and the ADAT optical output, set up tracks in a PT session and found that my old skinny optical cables were indeed the problem.  It must have been like putting audio through a pipe full of broken glass.

So I managed to transfer a couple of the songs I wanted to work on, and in the process I found a few old ideas that were mostly forgotten.  It was fun, similar to looking through an old photo album and seeing pictures you hadn’t thought of in a long time.

One in particular was interesting.  It was a jam that I subsequently sampled, using the samples in ACID to create a piece of music. That’s pretty much the opposite of the “normal” methodology around here.  Generally I would build a demo in ACID or PT or whatever, and then we would record the real instruments.

In fact I had forgotten that the track, which wound up on the drunkdude69 album Funk Out With Your Junk Out as a hidden track, was actually a real jam to begin with.  Here it is in all its boogery glory:

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CALIbrAt: An ADAT odyssey (part 1)

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The beginning of a long evening

I still have a few Alesis ADAT recorders lying around.  In the mid-1990s we used these things relentlessly to record demos, album tracks, jams, and other random noises which shall go undescribed.

As a result of that use, I have a number of demos of old songs still on ADAT tapes.  Since I’ve recently lit a fire under myself to complete some of these songs and put them together in album form, I decided to try to dig up a few old demo tracks and transfer them to Pro Tools.

Why go through the hassle? Well, there are a few performances on those old recordings that I’d like to save and build on if I can.  It is unlikely to make things easy (I can already feel the sweat breaking out on my forehead as I try to match a new session tempo to an old ADAT track with no click), but the tracks I am thinking of have become so lodged in my mind that the songs wouldn’t be done without them.

So I hooked up the old ADAT and connected it to my Pro Tools rig. Apparently that was my first mistake.

I hadn’t used this particular unit for a long time.  Years, maybe.  It’s been here in my temperature-controlled, smoke-free studio, and I try to keep the cat hair out of it as much as possible.  So when I fired it up and saw a few funky messages flash across the display, I figured I would soldier on and see how things went.

Not so good, really.

I put a tape in and tried to play it.  I got a fun message: no good tc - the ADAT didn’t like the time code on the tape.  Sure, maybe the tape is all old and nasty.  I put in another and got the same message.  I fast forwarded and rewound the tape a bit and some time code magically showed up.  When I pressed ‘play’, though, the display read “ERROR 07“.

Thank goodness for the Inter Nets, man. I found the error codes in a forum post here, and realized I’d have to pop the top on the machine and give it a good cleaning. Even though I hadn’t used it for a while. Years, I think I said.

So: I popped the top and gave everything a good cleaning.  In the course of my searching, I had found an article here that explained the message I was seeing on power-up: “CAL brAC“. Apparently the machine wanted its brakes checked, too.

Clean ADAT guts. The head is the big silver cylinder on the top left.

Fortunately the procedure for calibrating the brakes is outlined pretty well on the page.  I went through the steps with one tape, only to be stymied when the tape jumped its own internal reel and got tangled. I may have screamed “GODDAMMIT!” out loud.  Sorry about that.

I tried a second tape.  The routine went on for a few minutes, then just stopped.  The frozen display of the ADAT mocked me with its unceasing declaration: “CALIbrAt“.

To get it to stop I had to pull the plug (this is an ADAT XT-20, which has a soft rubber power switch, and which powers on as soon as the plug is inserted). When I reinserted the plug, a new message appeared after the “CAL brAC” message: “CAL P9“.

Oh, you SOB.

I ignored the second message and went through the calibration routine again.  Once again, the routine stopped in the middle and the black retina of the display continued to taunt me.  I gave it a good ten minutes to see if the calibration would start again.  I got more and more annoyed during that time that it wasn’t continuing. So I jammed my hand into the thing and mashed the tape around inside.

Amazingly the calibration routine chugged sluggishly back into motion. This is on a par with my friend Mike’s amazing engineering skill of being able to fix something by hurling it onto the floor.

A few minutes later, brake calibration was done and the machine insolently showed me “PASS” for a brief moment. Then it reminded me to “CAL P9” (which in ADAT parlance is actually “CAL PG“).

Another search later and I found the wacky procedure for calibrating the “pulse generator” (PG) that aligns timing between the head stack and the control track head.  Allegedly.  The only issue was that I couldn’t see any sticker on the inside back panel of the ADAT when I followed the instructions from that post.

So I popped the top again.  Apparently at some point Alesis stopped putting the sticker on the back panel and instead put it on the inside of the top cover.  Having found my special PG number, I went through the calibration steps and got it corrected.

There you are, you... *shakes fist*

The display still showed “CAL brAC” on startup, but I ignored it. The test tape played with no problems – no more “ERROR 7” and no more sunburst in the display that indicates error correction.  So I hooked up my optical cables and set up a PT session to transfer the audio.

When I started the session and hit play on the ADAT, I was greeted with massive digital noise with just a hint of audio.  I think my optical cables are fried.  I have new ones around here somewhere, but can’t seem to find them (of course).  So until I can determine if that’s the problem, this story will have to wait to be continued…

Virtual drum decisions

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When it comes to recording songs, I prefer to set up a session with a real live drummer.  I’ve been very fortunate in the past to work with professionals like Jim Evans in Nashville, Coach Hanna in New York, and Charley Newcomer here in Cleveland to name a few.  And as I continue on my recording journey I also am finding that I really prefer the sound of real live instruments.

However, when working on demos or just doing some jamming or writing, it’s not always feasible to have a drum kit mic’ed up, and often there’s not a drummer in the room.  So at that point I have to rely on other tools.  I think that may have been a drummer joke, sorry.

In the past I’ve enjoyed using Acid Pro to lay down ultra-quick drum tracks.  I started using Acid when it first came out, and it’s intuitive to stripe down a series of loops.  It’s also pretty tweakable as far as manipulating the loops that I’m using – I can slice and dice things into completely different patterns if I want.  And I like the way I can add loops of other instruments to fill out a temporary arrangement.

The workflow with Acid has left a little to be desired.  Even though I think you can now ReWire Acid directly into Pro Tools, I haven’t gotten that far.  I stopped at exporting the soloed drum/percussion tracks and importing that audio into the PT session.  I had to make sure that sample rates and tempo of the Acid output matched the PT session, and if I wanted to make changes I had to pretty much go back to the drawing board.

So this year I’ve been tooling around with some virtual drum plug-ins.  So far I’ve used the demo version of BFD Lite and Addictive Drums.  I’m trying to find a demo version of Superior Drummer 2.0 too, but no luck so far.

There’s a lot to like about the virtual drums (beyond the fact that they stay in time): they are MIDI-based, so I can program from scratch or use any of the hundreds of patterns available in the plug-in library; the samples are solid; the plug-ins have integrated mixers and controls that let you mix the drums as if they were actual inputs to a mixing board.  And in some instances you can change other aspects of the drums (damping, bleed from mic to mic, attacks, decays, and so on).

Once again it’s almost a case of having too much flexibility.  I can imagine sitting here tweaking drums all night instead of finishing a track.  But, in the absence of having access to a great studio and a pro drummer, this may be the best option.

I’m still trying to figure out which one I like best.  When I figure it out and pull the trigger I’ll follow up on this post.  Until then, if anyone has experience with these plug-ins, I’d welcome your input.