What Would It Take to Make You Switch DAWs?

[MartinC]

I bought an 001 when they first came out, but when apple bought logic, i switched. Why? Money. Your never finished spending money with digi. But now, my g5 will not run the new logic or the new PT. I'm screwed. I have to admit, I've never become as comfortable with logic as I was with PT, and the ability to bring a drive to a session at a studio that had all the plugs was great, but I'm really hesitant to let digi back into my checkbook. Of course apple is the same.

[locust tree]

Am I missing something? Does Pro Tools import session data from any other program? Or are you talking about the fact that since it's so popular, there will be a better chance of being able to import some other studio's sessions (because you're both using the same program).

 

 

No. I am referring to a specific feature in PT that allows you to overlay just about any aspect of one Pro Tools session file to another. This includes audio, effects chains, I/O routing...

 

The first and foremost application is akin to tossing on a different tape reel when you already have a mix up on the console, but it can also be used during tracking to overlay the last song's I/O settings. You can also use it to almagamate material from two different sessions. It's just a massive time saver. Other DAWs have various ways of doing this but they're considerably more convoluted. So my original point was that I've yet to see another DAW that has that particular functionality, and this one has sped up my workflow on the order of hours.

[Anderton]

 

It's like, all these manufacturers are already putting some kind of DSP chip in their interfaces already... how much more would it drive up costs to put in a better one and write some new code so maybe we can get a little EQ and some freakin' foldback reverb in our cans?

 

 

I'm doing a pro review on the Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP. It has onboard compression, EQ, and reverb that does exactly what you want...and you can track with the effects, or not. The reverb isn't stellar by any means, but it gets you reverb in the cans for monitoring.

[locust tree]

Me too - I do it all the time. I don't find it any problem at all to simply save the WAV files, import them into Reaper and continue. If I go back into the "big studio" I just render stems or tracks out of Reaper to WAV files, import them into PT and I'm ready to roll. It's no big deal.

Ahh ok. Nothin' wrong with doing it that way; I still have to from time to time.

It certainly has its bumps in the road though - some programs seem to have a really hard time with Broadcast Wave timestapming. I wish I could say that PT-generated BWF's just "drop right in" to Sonar but inevitably there's a couple stragglers that get helicoptered in about an hour out from the rest of the tune, haha. I've never been able to get to the bottom of this one.

Also whenever you render stems from a tracking session or even just single tracks, you've got some decisions to make regarding region consolidation and takes. Can you decide what the day's best take was? If you can't, or you're torn, or there's a couple that you'd like to comp together on your own time (dime?) are you willing to spend the time sorting through a mountain of similarly-named files as you figure out what PT playlist was what? Are you content with any on-the-fly edits or punches that were done that day so that they can be consolidated? If not, are you willing to re-do those edits yourself?

Anyway, I'm not saying it can't be done, and in some cases these issues never come up. But I've definitely had times where I've brought a big day of tracking home on a DVD thinking I'd just plop in a few audio files... and after sorting through the aformentioned issues, and then dealing with re-naming and organizing tracks and then re-doing general levels and pans, I've lost an hour just doing housekeeping work (much of which was already done once, on the tracking day) and I still don't have the luxury of casually paging through the day's takes. I'm not bemoaning this M.O. - obviously I've dealt with it more than a few times to know its drawbacks so intimately. I just think that with PT9 out I'm kind of jumping at an opportunity to not have these lost-in-DAW-translation issues.

[locust tree]

I'm doing a pro review on the Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP. It has onboard compression, EQ, and reverb that does exactly what you want...and you can track with the effects, or not. The reverb isn't stellar by any means, but it gets you reverb in the cans for monitoring.

 

 

Awesome, I'm reading the Pro Review now. The Focusrite's I/O falls a little short for my applications (particularly on the output side since I'm feeding a console) but I'm hoping this becomes a catalyst for more manufacturers integrating this kind of thing. I really feel that bad monitoring remains the biggest downfall of home recording situations. I also am more likely to trust onboard DSP effects from companies like Focusrite and MOTU who actually have experience writing plugin code.

 

Currently it's looking like the best contender for me is a MOTU 828mk3. I used a MkII unit for a while and was very underwhelmed by the converters but the newer Mk3 stuff is in a very different class... and go figure, people actually like the EQ and modeled LA-2A in Cuemix FX.

[MikeRivers]

 

I'd have to disagree with you there. You're pretty much up into the large-format big leagues (or shelling out for significant amounts of outboard processing) before you're getting cue mixes with full EQ and a dynamics strip on each channel. And once again, those effects go to tape.

 

You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. First off, who really needs full EQ and dynamics control in the headphones when tracking? It's true that the engineer in the control room may want to have access to those features to trim up his monitor mix to get an idea of how things are going, but unless what you hear when you track is going to be the final mix, you're going to do all of that over anyway when you get to the mixdown phase.

 

As far as any EQ, effects, or processing goint on to the recording, OK, you need to have a sufficiently advanced mixer that it has either direct outputs or outputs that you can use as direct outputs (like Insert jacks) so you can send an un-processed signal to the computer. But you can do this with many $300 mixers, even some cheaper.

 

Also keep in mind that the dinky "DSP" mixers that come bundled in with most mid-level interfaces are somewhat of a misnomer, as the only real signal processing going on is panning and level setting. In my opinion this is pretty much insufficient for anything other than the most quick and dirty headphone mixes.

 

That's correct. But there are ways to get effects into the headphone mix if you want them. Most of the time, though, a quick and dirty headphone mix is adequate for tracking, and you really can keep a session moving along if you don't fuss and fuss with the headphone mix until it's exactly right. I understand that it has to be comfortable and workable for the artist, but anyone who MUST have all the bells and whistles in the headphones before he can sing should probably seek out a studio that can provide that at whatever cost. But this is all about how you choose to make money, or make recordings.

 

Interesting point about the vocal comb filtering - not a problem I've yet run into but I'll listen for it. In general I think cue mixing is one of the last frontiers where there is still a massive dividing line between the big league DAW systems and home studios, as far as just attaining a vibe during a tracking session.

 

I'll go along with you on that, as long as what else goes into the studio is on par with what's providing the cue mixes. You don't want to have to say "I only have an SM58 to record your vocal because I had to sell the U47 in order to afford the Pro Tools HD system.."

 

The way to listen for the vocal comb filtering is to put on a set of headphones and sing or talk into the mic. Start out with the headphone volume all the way off. Then turn it up slowly and you'll start hearing your voice with the null as you hear the headphone signal mixed in with what you hear through your head. As you increase the headphone volume further, the headphone signal will be significantly louder than the "acoustic" signal and it will become dominant and the comb filtering will go away.

 

I really have to stretch to recall a DAW-based home studio where the monitoring situation didn't make me want to stop playing every instrument forever.

 

That's a little extreme. What's the problem? Are you hearing a significant delay in the headphones, on the order of 100 milliseconds or later, because you're monitoring the mix that comes back from the computer? That's the flaw with a simple DAW. People fight latency battles to get this down to a tolerable (less than about 30 ms) amount of delay, but some are more fussy about this than others. This is where the interface with a DSP monitor mixer can help. Being independent of the computer, it's at least consistent, and with a good design, can ble in the order of a couple of milliseconds. That's what Pro Tools HD has that makes people say "monitoring is no problem with a DAW" - but not everyone can afford such a system. You can get much of the capability with a simple analog mixer and a good understanding of signal routing. You should read the "Signals From Source to DAW" article on my web site.

 

It's like, all these manufacturers are already putting some kind of DSP chip in their interfaces already... how much more would it drive up costs to put in a better one and write some new code so maybe we can get a little EQ and some freakin' foldback reverb in our cans?

 

DSP engineering doesn't come cheap, but A/D and D/A converter chips do. As long as the bulk of the customers want inexpensive hardware, the hardware that's capable of emulating a fully featured digital mixer (and that's really what you're asking for) with less than 1 ms of throughput delay from mic in to headphone out will forever be reserved for the higher end systems.

 

I've long held the opinion that this stuff is way too cheap. In order to maintain the bargain basement price point, features that we found essential in a conventional studio have gone by the wayside. There's a generation, maybe two by now, of people who are recording for the first time, on a very low budget, because they can, and to them, this is "normal."

 

Understand that the bulk of "studios" today aren't studios with separate engineer and music talent. It's one person doing everything, usually after work or on weekends, with low cost trumping workflow speed. There's what you're looking for if you're willing to pay for it, but not on a MOTU budget yet. Focusrite has been doing a little of what you're looking for, but they're working on the low end. They have a "personal sized" I/O box with a DSP gimmick that lets you simulate different monitoring environments in the headphones, and along with that DSP, there are some EQ and reverb that can be sent to the headphone mix. But it's not a full blown console by any means.

[MikeRivers]

some programs seem to have a really hard time with Broadcast Wave timestapming. I wish I could say that PT-generated BWF's just "drop right in" to Sonar but inevitably there's a couple stragglers that get helicoptered in about an hour out from the rest of the tune

Computers are like that, but as the program that creates the file and the program that imports it get closer to the same generation, this problem will go away.

Also whenever you render stems from a tracking session or even just single tracks, you've got some decisions to make regarding region consolidation and takes. Can you decide what the day's best take was?

OOOOH!!! NOW you've pushed a hot button with me. If you can't decide which take is best, you need to go back to producer school. Either it's good enough or it's not. You pick the one that's good enough and move on. If none are good enough, you do it again or you change the part to something that you can handle.

If you can't, or you're torn, or there's a couple that you'd like to comp together on your own time (dime?) are you willing to spend the time sorting through a mountain of similarly-named files as you figure out what PT playlist was what?

The problem is that you chose to record mountains of "well, if nothing else works, maybe we can use something from this pile" tracks. That means you're not ready to record, or you don't know where your recording is going. I realize that a lot of this goes on during the writing or composing process - a recorder is a great tool for aiding that process. But writing should be considered separate from the recording-for-keeps process.

Are you content with any on-the-fly edits or punches that were done that day so that they can be consolidated?

Of course. You get it right and move on. If you postpone every decision, or most decisions, you can easily find yourself wondering why you decided to record all of those takes. If the plan is, say, to record half a dozen vocal tracks and comp between them, that's OK, but do it and get it done. Or if you want to take a mix to a studio to record a piano track along with the vocal, pick the closest one or make one that has the phrasing that you're after and work with that.

I've definitely had times where I've brought a big day of tracking home on a DVD thinking I'd just plop in a few audio files... and after sorting through the aformentioned issues, and then dealing with re-naming and organizing tracks and then re-doing general levels and pans, I've lost an hour just doing housekeeping work (much of which was already done once, on the tracking day)

Sure, but think of how much money you saved, and how closer to perfect you can get the project? If someone else is paying for your time, then by all means charge for it. If it's your own work, then you can take as much time as you need - not being on the clock is why all these people are recording themselves in their spare bedroom.

I'm not bemoaning this M.O. - obviously I've dealt with it more than a few times to know its drawbacks so intimately. I just think that with PT9 out I'm kind of jumping at an opportunity to not have these lost-in-DAW-translation issues.

I have a Chinese fortune cookie fortune that says: "Progress consists of trading old problems for new." Keep that in mind.

[Lee Flier]

Ahh ok. Nothin' wrong with doing it that way; I still have to from time to time. It certainly has its bumps in the road though - some programs seem to have a really hard time with Broadcast Wave timestapming. I wish I could say that PT-generated BWF's just "drop right in" to Sonar but inevitably there's a couple stragglers that get helicoptered in about an hour out from the rest of the tune, haha. I've never been able to get to the bottom of this one.

 

Wow, that's pretty weird. Never run into that one!

 

Also whenever you render stems from a tracking session or even just single tracks, you've got some decisions to make regarding region consolidation and takes. Can you decide what the day's best take was? If you can't, or you're torn, or there's a couple that you'd like to comp together on your own time (dime?) are you willing to spend the time sorting through a mountain of similarly-named files as you figure out what PT playlist was what? Are you content with any on-the-fly edits or punches that were done that day so that they can be consolidated? If not, are you willing to re-do those edits yourself?

 

See, I just don't ever really run into those kinds of issues. I came up working with tape, and in fact I still track to tape and then transfer to digital a good bit of the time. So I never end up with so many comps that it's hard to consolidate them. I work with people who have their {censored} together and don't need to do that. And it's rare that I end up with more than 4 or 5 complete takes of any given tune, so I just render all of them at the end of the day and take them all home where we can decide later which one to use/edit/whatever.

 

If I have punches I did that day, no I'm not afraid to commit to them. It's very rare that I do any editing on a tracking day, so I'm not worried about that. Basically, I plan for working the way I work so it's second nature: the goal on a PT session is to get contiguous takes, each with possibly a few comps, knowing that I'll be transferring to Reaper later. If someone else is sending me files from a PT session, I just have them render everything to continuous zero-relative tracks the same way and we're good to go.

 

I do any editing and comping at my leisure, in Reaper, and then if I'm going to take the tracks back to the PT studio for overdubs, I just render the finished tracks back out. I'm not going to be using them, except for reference, so I'm not bound to make any crucial decisions at that point. I don't do any mixing in PT - I either do it at home with Reaper, or if I'm going to mix from a PT session, it's going to be on a console. Console time is expensive, so again if I'm doing that, I'll have already gotten it together at home - finished my editing and comping, done a pre-mix to map out what I want to do.

 

For me, anyway, this method of working allows me to maximize my budget. If my primary purpose in going to a "big studio" is to use their console and/or tracking room (and that's generally the case), I don't want to be wasting my time doing edits and stuff there anyway, when that's something that can be done later on my own DAW. So I get the best of both worlds and the most bang for the buck, IMO, and it's never been necessary for me to have PT at home.

 

I find it a little amusing that anyone's worried about spending an hour doing housekeeping, when people are willing to spend 97 hours going through a crapload of comps and trying to piece them into something serviceable. I'm not accusing anyone here of that specifically, but just saying - you save a lot more time on the back end if you're willing to do some preparation on the front end. And not coincidentally, that also makes it easier to work with people who have different DAWs.

[Lee Flier]

OOOOH!!! NOW you've pushed a hot button with me. If you can't decide which take is best, you need to go back to producer school. Either it's good enough or it's not. You pick the one that's good enough and move on.

 

In general I agree, but if you actually have an artist that has it together , you can end up with several takes that are all good, and it may not be obvious that day which one is best. Or you might decide the first half of one take is great but the second half of another take really pushes it over a cliff. This has been the case forever and it's fine, to me, to take them all home and decide later. It can be hard to tell sometimes in the heat of the moment, during a long day of tracking. Yeah, sometimes you hit a take where everyone is certain that's "the one," but just as often I've taken 4 takes home, and everybody'd agreed Take 3 was "the one," but when we listen back a day or two later suddenly it's "OMG, how did we not realize how much better Take 2 was!"

 

So if it's that kind of thing, then yeah, having several takes is fine. If you have a bunch of mediocre takes or somebody can't get through a take without screwing up, then I agree, they're not ready to record.

 

The problem is that you chose to record mountains of "well, if nothing else works, maybe we can use something from this pile" tracks. That means you're not ready to record, or you don't know where your recording is going. I realize that a lot of this goes on during the writing or composing process - a recorder is a great tool for aiding that process. But writing should be considered separate from the recording-for-keeps process.

 

Amen! I don't think this can be stated enough, like I said in my last post. So many recordings are done now where the artist and the producer have no idea where the arrangement's going at the time they do the track. How can this possibly result in anything good? No one knows when to change up the dynamics, when to hold back and when to push it... it's an insane way to try to make music that has any emotional depth. I realize this is considered "normal" these days, but "normal" it ain't.

[MikeRivers]

In general I agree, but if you actually have an artist that has it together , you can end up with several takes that are all good, and it may not be obvious that day which one is best. Or you might decide the first half of one take is great but the second half of another take really pushes it over a cliff.

Sure, this is pretty much the way that most people work, but it's a matter of degrees. You can probably throw out 16 out of 20 takes and not worry too much that you destroyed the only good time a particular word was sung correctly. And when you have a chance you can play with different combinations of takes to see if there's something you liked better. If you find somethig better than your original choice, you slap it in and move on even if you've rendered the track. Presumably all the takes were sung to the same backing so you're not going to end up with something that's too long or too short and gets out of sync. There's a solution to that, too, if you want to take the time, but this is really where i draw the line. It's also why I don't take outside clients who want to make it perfect when it isn't. But that's a different discussion.

 

So many recordings are done now where the artist and the producer have no idea where the arrangement's going at the time they do the track. How can this possibly result in anything good?

I'll be darned if I know, but sometimes it works. And sometimes it makes a recording that would never be possible. Some artists feel that it's just that important that their work gets out in an acceptable fashion, and some listeners think that everybody should have a chance.

 

And, no, we didn't do very much of this before DAWs. But that's not to say never.