Times two or times four?
Another late session in the studio last night. It seems that no matter how much time I anticipate a project taking it is nearly always double my original estimate. What is up with that? Sometimes I try to trick myself by doubling the amount of time I would normally think something will take and saying that it is my original guess. You would think that it would work but it ends up take twice as long anyway, giving me a project that takes 4 times as long as what I thought in the first place! Sometimes it is my fault sometimes not. When it’s not my fault I have a tendency to gripe, I have a feeling that you are in for a whole lot of griping.
Gripe one; the studio setup at my uni. Now don’t get me wrong, it is a great studio, with quality microphones, and the control 24 desk is fantastic to work with. We have 2 control rooms and two recording spaces. One is a dead room, and the other is a live room. The dead room, which is the room that I would prefer to do vocal recordings can only be booked with studio 2. The problem with this setup is that there is no intercom. How am I supposed to communicate with a vocalist in a room that sound cannot penetrate? Ok, so I can’t blame the under funded uni, I guess the leaves the government. Damn bureaucrats and their red tape. Anyway with some time lost I found a solution by setting up a condenser mic (for sensitivity) in the control room and patching it into the mixer. No problem, gripe over.
Gripe two; you thought it was over? Guess again. This gripe is over the headphone amp. Now maybe this gripe is unwarranted, perhaps that only person at fault is myself and due to my lack of knowledge in the fine art of patch bay technicalities. Either way I lost much time trying to achieve a relatively simple outcome. This being, a clean signal from the dead room into ProTools, accompanied by a signal with reverb from the DP4 unit back into the dead room. This signal must be accompanied by the music which must remain unaffected. The point of all this is to make the singer more comfortable by adding some sweetness to his voice in the cans but not altering the recorded version. After much stuffing around I found it impossible to setup and gave up. The headphone amp would only output the vox or the music separately, never simultaneously. It appears that I’m not the only person that has had issues with this infernal device, as every time I work in studio 2 the headphone line is plugged not into the headphone amp, but into the mixing desk
Gripe three; just kidding! I have nothing else to report, only a dark void where my patience used to reside. See you next week!
posted by Daniel Murtagh @ 19:30
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