RAGINPIT MAGAZINE

Stephen A . - The Grumpy Old Sound Man himself

When I first started recording bands I had a Teac 3440 . It was a big four channel machine that I brought back from a tour in the lovely country of Vietnam cialis. It was very heavy and took these giant reels of tape, very expensive tape when you ran it at top speed cheap cialis. It had DBX noise reduction and was quite a nice machine cialis. It set me back about $500. This was quite a bit back then. I soon moved on to an Otari eight channel machine. It was even more expensive for the half inch tape .

With the ownership of such a machine you had to do regular maintenance to keep the recording as good as it could be. Multimeters, alignment tapes and a good oscilloscope were a necessity if you didn’t want the expense or the downtime waiting for the shop to perform the alignment.

Now you have DAWs with hard drives and computers capable of recording over one hundred tracks that take up a fraction of space that my old eight channel monster did. An occasional defrag of the hard drive is about all the maintenance needed today.

This brings me to the meat of this article - the record engine of your recordings. Be it DAW or computer based recordings, software is the driving force in both. I prefer rack mounted mic pre’s and a butt load of ram. Now DAWs are a fine compact device for the initial recordings of your work, but they are limited in the processing power needed for a really high end product and some DAWs skimp on the quality of mic pre‘s in them. Remember… Crap in - crap out.

Sooner or later the project will need to be transferred to the workhorse computer to be polished into a finished product. There are many software programs available for your endeavors from free to costly. I own every thing from Protools to Soundforge. My desktop has about fifty shortcuts to various recording software programs. I never remove any of them just in case someone comes over and has a preference to one editing software to another. Now here is where cheap is as cheap does. You as musicians will, without hesitation, drop a thousand dollars for a rig be it guitar, keys or drums, but it just baffles me when you will only spend a few dollars for your recording software. I don’t understand the rationale of that move. You go into your store of choice and buy some run of the mill software to produce the most important product that you hope will get you noticed in the music biz. Quit being cheap!!!

Now the software of my liking is from a German company that flies under the radar of most American musicians. They make two programs, one I can afford and one that I can only dream of. The dream program is called Sequoia. Dig deep for this one folks, it’s in the thousands. Now you can rent Sequoia, but it is better to buy the light version than rent the full blown version. The light version that I am talking about is Samplitude. This jewel will set you back just under a grand, but well worth it. My first version was acquired about five years ago and is still better than 99% of the software out there today. Google Samplitude on the web and check it out. And by the way you can download a demo to see if you like the product at Samplitude and Sequoia

Remember, you will drop money for rigs, girls, drugs, and beer so you might as well get something that will out last three of the fore-mentioned objects. When your fellow musicians hear the finished product they might want you to finalize their projects for a decent fee too.

And as always, remember… Don’t piss off the sound man!!!