Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
O.K. , my column will be a little different this week. A sort of interactive Tool Thursday. I think it might be really helpful if all three you who read this column, and that includes my mom, let us know of websites that have been helpful with keeping you up to speed with the industry. They could be tech sites, new music sites, industry business sites, etc. I am always amazed at the seemingly endless array of new sites that pop up each day and I’m sure I don’t know half of them. This may help a lot of us get better plugged in. I’ll start with a few and let you go from there.
The Obvious-
http://duc.digidesign.com/
The Maybe Not So Obvious-
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/
(Need I say more)
http://www.wired.com/
(This site often has industry articles if they have a tech/ web component
http://www.engadget.com/
(for the gadget geek in you)
http://gizmodo.com/
(for the gadget geek in you)
http://www.nashvillemusicpros.com/
(This relatively new site is the most useful to those in the Nashville area, but open to people in the industry world-wide)
O.K., now it’s your turn.
See you next time,
Jed
Showing posts with label Computer Editing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computer Editing. Show all posts
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Pass on the Music
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
Just about every time I contact a prospective client I can sense the fear and hesitation in their voice about editing and tuning. It is usually an up hill battle just to get that first job with them. To tell you the truth I can’t blame them. The underlying problem is a lack of trust in editors, brought about by years of inexperienced, unmusical work. I have had new clients assume that they will have to sit with me while I tune a vocal to tell me when things are sharp or flat based on their past experiences. Others are afraid that if they have a song “tightened” it will come back stiff as a board, with all traces of musicality removed from the performance. A stigma has developed with editing and it is a real shame.
How have we gotten to this point? I think we got here because most engineers would rather have their fingernails pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers, a la Syriana, than sit and tune a vocal or tweak a track. Thus the birth of the “Pro Tools Engineer”. Young engineers figured out that a great way to escape assisting was to learn Pro Tools. The older, more experienced engineers gladly handed off the mind numbing Pro Tools work to the new guys. The problem is that until engineers gain enough musical experience, they tend to edit with their eyes, not their ears.
Now let me stop here and say that I was an inexperienced new guy at one point as well. So don’t be sending me any hate mail because you think I’m looking down my nose at the new guys. What I am trying to say is that even though editing may seem simple and mindless, it takes time and experience for an engineer to develop the musicality needed not to mess things up.
I was really fortunate to work for many years with a great producer/ engineer. When I started editing for him I didn’t know my head from a whole in the ground. I would edit a bass part, send it to him, and he would send it right back and say “ It’s a little too laid back, it needs to stay aggressive. I want it to feel like a band”...or I would tighten a drum kit and he would point out parts that seemed stiff or could push or pull more. And the rules changed as we jumped from genre to genre.
The point is that if we are going to sub out editing work to newer engineers we need to oversee things and guide them in the more musical fine points of editing, just as someone did for me. It took years before I got to the point that I was editing with my ears instead of my eyes. Let’s not forget to pass on the musical knowledge needed to be a great editor as we pass on the workload.
Until next time, take care.
Jed
Just about every time I contact a prospective client I can sense the fear and hesitation in their voice about editing and tuning. It is usually an up hill battle just to get that first job with them. To tell you the truth I can’t blame them. The underlying problem is a lack of trust in editors, brought about by years of inexperienced, unmusical work. I have had new clients assume that they will have to sit with me while I tune a vocal to tell me when things are sharp or flat based on their past experiences. Others are afraid that if they have a song “tightened” it will come back stiff as a board, with all traces of musicality removed from the performance. A stigma has developed with editing and it is a real shame.
How have we gotten to this point? I think we got here because most engineers would rather have their fingernails pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers, a la Syriana, than sit and tune a vocal or tweak a track. Thus the birth of the “Pro Tools Engineer”. Young engineers figured out that a great way to escape assisting was to learn Pro Tools. The older, more experienced engineers gladly handed off the mind numbing Pro Tools work to the new guys. The problem is that until engineers gain enough musical experience, they tend to edit with their eyes, not their ears.
Now let me stop here and say that I was an inexperienced new guy at one point as well. So don’t be sending me any hate mail because you think I’m looking down my nose at the new guys. What I am trying to say is that even though editing may seem simple and mindless, it takes time and experience for an engineer to develop the musicality needed not to mess things up.
I was really fortunate to work for many years with a great producer/ engineer. When I started editing for him I didn’t know my head from a whole in the ground. I would edit a bass part, send it to him, and he would send it right back and say “ It’s a little too laid back, it needs to stay aggressive. I want it to feel like a band”...or I would tighten a drum kit and he would point out parts that seemed stiff or could push or pull more. And the rules changed as we jumped from genre to genre.
The point is that if we are going to sub out editing work to newer engineers we need to oversee things and guide them in the more musical fine points of editing, just as someone did for me. It took years before I got to the point that I was editing with my ears instead of my eyes. Let’s not forget to pass on the musical knowledge needed to be a great editor as we pass on the workload.
Until next time, take care.
Jed
Thursday, April 3, 2008
It Should Have Been Cut Faster
Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
Have you ever been in the middle of overdubs and the artist or A&R person says “I don’t know... it just feels slow to me. Can you speed it up?” Fun, isn’t it. To an extent you can varispeed the track but at a certain threshold things just get silly. You can use Pitch n’ Time, which I think is the best of the time stretch tools, but even that seriously degrades the quality of your audio. You could recut but there goes your budget. So what do you do? A friend of mine and I developed a great way to speed up tracks without sacrificing all of that hard work you put in to get great sounds.
Let me first say that this is extremely time consuming but left with no other good option, it works great!
1) Use Pitch ‘n Time on a rough mix to figure out what the new tempo should be. You don’t want to guess wrong and do all of this work for nothing.
2) Make a duplicate copy of your session just in case things go horribly wrong
3) Group all of your tracks together
4) Make a duplicate playlist of all of your tracks including the click
5) Make sure all of your fades are in order and consolidate your tracks, all from the same start position to the end of the song
6) Ungroup all of your tracks and chop the click up at every 16th note (You can do eighth notes if no one is playing anything faster than eighths)
7) Regroup all of your tracks and make sure that the tab feature is set to tab to the edge of every region, not the waveform.
8) Place your cursor at the beginning of the song and tab to the first break in the click. Break all of the audio tracks at that point.
9) Make a new grid, starting from that first click, at your faster tempo
Now comes the tedious part
10) Tab to the next break in the click and break all of the audio
11) Leave your curser at that break, go to grid mode, and shift click to the new grid mark for that beat
12) Go to Shuffle mode and delete the region you just highlighted. This will move everything up to the new grid mark.
13) Repeat steps 10-12 until you are either at the end of the song or the end of your rope! Check how things are sounding after a few bars just to make sure you are on the right path... because it is a very long path.
14) Save another duplicate copy of your session just in case something goes wrong in this next step
15) Ungroup your tracks and start smoothing out all of your edit points. For the most part you can just get rid of the edits on an instrument that occur in the middle of a note. In the case of some longer sustained notes you may have to mess with the end of the notes a bit to get things to sound right. For example, if your drum kit is for the most part an eighth note pattern you can simply get rid of the edits that occur on the 16th notes and crossfade at the beginning of every eighth note. You may however have a guitar note that is held out, and in order for the end of the note to sound natural you may have to crossfade at some point during the note to get a natural ending. This method of speeding things up works even with the occasional triplet fill or lick, just drag the edit points to the beginning of the notes. Every once in a while you may have to nudge a lick here or there depending on how far you are moving the tempo. Vocals can be tricky with this but of the 5 or 6 tracks that I have done this way we only had to recut vocals on one because the phrasing got a little to weird.
16) Consolidate your new tracks when you have all of the edits smoothed out
17) Go to your regions menu and get rid of the thousands of unused regions that you just created. Et Fine!
I used this method for a couple of songs on a country record and 3 or 4 songs on a metal record. On both projects the tracks needed to be sped up anywhere between 5 - 10 bpm. Not an ideal situation to be in but you have to give the artists and labels what they want. It took me about 2 days per track, so it is not a quick fix but in the end the sonic integrity of your recording is maintained and you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. Just put on NPR or some republican talk radio show, depending on your political slant, while your chopping the tracks up and it won’t seem so bad.
Take care,
Jed
Have you ever been in the middle of overdubs and the artist or A&R person says “I don’t know... it just feels slow to me. Can you speed it up?” Fun, isn’t it. To an extent you can varispeed the track but at a certain threshold things just get silly. You can use Pitch n’ Time, which I think is the best of the time stretch tools, but even that seriously degrades the quality of your audio. You could recut but there goes your budget. So what do you do? A friend of mine and I developed a great way to speed up tracks without sacrificing all of that hard work you put in to get great sounds.
Let me first say that this is extremely time consuming but left with no other good option, it works great!
1) Use Pitch ‘n Time on a rough mix to figure out what the new tempo should be. You don’t want to guess wrong and do all of this work for nothing.
2) Make a duplicate copy of your session just in case things go horribly wrong
3) Group all of your tracks together
4) Make a duplicate playlist of all of your tracks including the click
5) Make sure all of your fades are in order and consolidate your tracks, all from the same start position to the end of the song
6) Ungroup all of your tracks and chop the click up at every 16th note (You can do eighth notes if no one is playing anything faster than eighths)
7) Regroup all of your tracks and make sure that the tab feature is set to tab to the edge of every region, not the waveform.
8) Place your cursor at the beginning of the song and tab to the first break in the click. Break all of the audio tracks at that point.
9) Make a new grid, starting from that first click, at your faster tempo
Now comes the tedious part
10) Tab to the next break in the click and break all of the audio
11) Leave your curser at that break, go to grid mode, and shift click to the new grid mark for that beat
12) Go to Shuffle mode and delete the region you just highlighted. This will move everything up to the new grid mark.
13) Repeat steps 10-12 until you are either at the end of the song or the end of your rope! Check how things are sounding after a few bars just to make sure you are on the right path... because it is a very long path.
14) Save another duplicate copy of your session just in case something goes wrong in this next step
15) Ungroup your tracks and start smoothing out all of your edit points. For the most part you can just get rid of the edits on an instrument that occur in the middle of a note. In the case of some longer sustained notes you may have to mess with the end of the notes a bit to get things to sound right. For example, if your drum kit is for the most part an eighth note pattern you can simply get rid of the edits that occur on the 16th notes and crossfade at the beginning of every eighth note. You may however have a guitar note that is held out, and in order for the end of the note to sound natural you may have to crossfade at some point during the note to get a natural ending. This method of speeding things up works even with the occasional triplet fill or lick, just drag the edit points to the beginning of the notes. Every once in a while you may have to nudge a lick here or there depending on how far you are moving the tempo. Vocals can be tricky with this but of the 5 or 6 tracks that I have done this way we only had to recut vocals on one because the phrasing got a little to weird.
16) Consolidate your new tracks when you have all of the edits smoothed out
17) Go to your regions menu and get rid of the thousands of unused regions that you just created. Et Fine!
I used this method for a couple of songs on a country record and 3 or 4 songs on a metal record. On both projects the tracks needed to be sped up anywhere between 5 - 10 bpm. Not an ideal situation to be in but you have to give the artists and labels what they want. It took me about 2 days per track, so it is not a quick fix but in the end the sonic integrity of your recording is maintained and you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. Just put on NPR or some republican talk radio show, depending on your political slant, while your chopping the tracks up and it won’t seem so bad.
Take care,
Jed
Thursday, February 28, 2008
AutoTune RTAS Not TDM
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
AutoTune RTAS Not TDM
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Knowing When To Make A U-Turn
Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
I just recently edited a track for a client... drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals, etc. As I worked, everything seemed to be falling into place quite nicely as usual. However, when I finished with the track something just wasn’t settling with me about it. Usually when I get that settled feeling I know everything is right. With this track I just couldn’t get to that point. Each part individually seemed to groove but the whole picture just seemed a bit off. When I went back to the original playlist I realized that even though it had problems, the underlying groove felt better to me. I knew I couldn’t just leave the track in it’s original state because it did have a jerky feeling to it that the producer wanted to fix, but there was something that had gotten lost in all of my tweaking.
I started comparing the two versions closely and decided to switch back to the original playlists on the electrics in the choruses, let some of the lead instruments and vocals rush a bit more and pushed some of drums fills. I ended up with a compromise between the original and the tweaked track. Once I did that I finally got that settled feeling and knew it was right.
When we dive into editing, or tuning for that matter, it is easy to lose perspective, even when we are aware that it can happen. When I finish a track I always go back to the original playlists and compare it to my tweaked version just to make sure I did the song justice. I usually find a few things that I like more about the original and incorporate them into the final product. I think the hardest thing to do as an engineer is to know when to turn around. There are plenty of times when we can use technology to enhance the music we work on, but we have to possess enough humility to know when we’re just messing things up.
See you next week,
Jed
I just recently edited a track for a client... drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals, etc. As I worked, everything seemed to be falling into place quite nicely as usual. However, when I finished with the track something just wasn’t settling with me about it. Usually when I get that settled feeling I know everything is right. With this track I just couldn’t get to that point. Each part individually seemed to groove but the whole picture just seemed a bit off. When I went back to the original playlist I realized that even though it had problems, the underlying groove felt better to me. I knew I couldn’t just leave the track in it’s original state because it did have a jerky feeling to it that the producer wanted to fix, but there was something that had gotten lost in all of my tweaking.
I started comparing the two versions closely and decided to switch back to the original playlists on the electrics in the choruses, let some of the lead instruments and vocals rush a bit more and pushed some of drums fills. I ended up with a compromise between the original and the tweaked track. Once I did that I finally got that settled feeling and knew it was right.
When we dive into editing, or tuning for that matter, it is easy to lose perspective, even when we are aware that it can happen. When I finish a track I always go back to the original playlists and compare it to my tweaked version just to make sure I did the song justice. I usually find a few things that I like more about the original and incorporate them into the final product. I think the hardest thing to do as an engineer is to know when to turn around. There are plenty of times when we can use technology to enhance the music we work on, but we have to possess enough humility to know when we’re just messing things up.
See you next week,
Jed
Thursday, January 24, 2008
What The F#$@!
Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
Come on, you know that’s the exact phrase that comes out of your mouth when your session is running smoothly all day long and at the most inopportune time you get a DAE error, or worse, the Chinese screen of death. Many of you know the drill on dealing with DAE errors and crashes, but for those of you who just reboot and hope it goes away, here are some tips on figuring out exactly what is going on and how to get rid of it for good.
First of all when it happens, either write down the error code or if you can, take a screen shot of your desktop by pressing shift/apple/3. You may also want to keep a log of error events. Write down what you were doing at the time the error occurred. By keeping a log, you may start to see a pattern. Maybe it happens every time you pull up a particular plug-in, or try to play through a certain spot of your session.
The next thing you should do is go to the Digidesign website and do a search for the error. Here is a link to the Digidesign support page. They can usually tell you what the error means and sometimes guide you as to how to fix it. If you strike out with the search on the Digidesign support page, you can do a search on their Digi Users Conference. The DUC is an online community of Pro Tools users who post lots of useful info.
Once you find out what the error means then what? Sometimes the solution is easy. For example, it may say that you are having trouble recording to your drive because the volume’s name is too long. So you shorten the name of your drive and no more error. Or maybe it says that your drive is too slow or too fragmented, so you copy your files to another drive and you are back up and running again.
Sometimes however, the solution is not quite so obvious. If that is the case I recommend you read my column “Trashing Those Preferences” and follow the instructions. Many times that will fix the problem. If after trashing your preferences and repairing your disk permissions, you are still experiencing the error, go to the Digidesign site and make sure your computer, operating system, and Pro Tools version are all compatible. I wrote more on that subject in “To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade?”. Next you can try posting your problem on the DUC and see if you get some help as to how to fix it. Also, try running the problem past some of your friends to see if they have had a similar experience. We all learn from each other, so don’t be afraid to ask. Have you noticed that the really great engineers always ask?
There are so many types of errors out there that it would be silly to go into much more detail here, but maybe this will get you headed in the right direction. And if none of this helps, I recommend going immediately to your local brew pub. If you’re in Nashville, try Yazoo.
Let me know if you have discovered any other good ways of trouble shooting, or good sources of information, I’d like to know. Talk to you soon... and for those of you headed to the brew pub, here is a great toast I got from my dad. “Here’s to you and here’s to me and may we never disagree. But if we do, to hell with you and here’s to me.”
Take care,
Jed
Come on, you know that’s the exact phrase that comes out of your mouth when your session is running smoothly all day long and at the most inopportune time you get a DAE error, or worse, the Chinese screen of death. Many of you know the drill on dealing with DAE errors and crashes, but for those of you who just reboot and hope it goes away, here are some tips on figuring out exactly what is going on and how to get rid of it for good.
First of all when it happens, either write down the error code or if you can, take a screen shot of your desktop by pressing shift/apple/3. You may also want to keep a log of error events. Write down what you were doing at the time the error occurred. By keeping a log, you may start to see a pattern. Maybe it happens every time you pull up a particular plug-in, or try to play through a certain spot of your session.
The next thing you should do is go to the Digidesign website and do a search for the error. Here is a link to the Digidesign support page. They can usually tell you what the error means and sometimes guide you as to how to fix it. If you strike out with the search on the Digidesign support page, you can do a search on their Digi Users Conference. The DUC is an online community of Pro Tools users who post lots of useful info.
Once you find out what the error means then what? Sometimes the solution is easy. For example, it may say that you are having trouble recording to your drive because the volume’s name is too long. So you shorten the name of your drive and no more error. Or maybe it says that your drive is too slow or too fragmented, so you copy your files to another drive and you are back up and running again.
Sometimes however, the solution is not quite so obvious. If that is the case I recommend you read my column “Trashing Those Preferences” and follow the instructions. Many times that will fix the problem. If after trashing your preferences and repairing your disk permissions, you are still experiencing the error, go to the Digidesign site and make sure your computer, operating system, and Pro Tools version are all compatible. I wrote more on that subject in “To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade?”. Next you can try posting your problem on the DUC and see if you get some help as to how to fix it. Also, try running the problem past some of your friends to see if they have had a similar experience. We all learn from each other, so don’t be afraid to ask. Have you noticed that the really great engineers always ask?
There are so many types of errors out there that it would be silly to go into much more detail here, but maybe this will get you headed in the right direction. And if none of this helps, I recommend going immediately to your local brew pub. If you’re in Nashville, try Yazoo.
Let me know if you have discovered any other good ways of trouble shooting, or good sources of information, I’d like to know. Talk to you soon... and for those of you headed to the brew pub, here is a great toast I got from my dad. “Here’s to you and here’s to me and may we never disagree. But if we do, to hell with you and here’s to me.”
Take care,
Jed
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Trashing Those Preferences
Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett...
Is your Pro Tools rig prone to crashes? One source of trouble for your rig are preferences. Certain changes you make to your Pro Tools session are stored in temporary files called preferences. For instance, when you change your hardware, playback engine, or preference settings, those changes are stored in preference files. When Pro Tools crashes, those preferences are easily corrupted. If you don’t get rid of them after a crash you are much more likely to experience more crashes until you do.
Note: PC users consult with digidesign about this before you do it. This is meant for mac users.
After a crash you should throw away the following files found in Home>Library>Preferences:
1)DAE Prefs
2)Digisetup.OSX
3)Pro Tools v7.x Preferences
4)com.digidesign.ProToolsHD.plist
Next, on each hard drive connected to your system there is a folder called digidesign databases. Trash that as well. Don’t worry, Pro Tools will rebuild all the files that you just trashed the next time you fire up the program.
Once you have thrown those files away, reboot your computer. When the mac reboots, it will repair any damage to the boot up drive before launching OSX.
After your mac reboots, open the disk utility program located in Applications>Utilities. You will notice that for each drive on your system the disk utility lists the technical name for the drive and underneath is the name you gave the drive when you formated it. For example 233.8 GB Maxtor 7Y250MO>Mac Drive. Click on the tech name for the drive so that it is highlighted and click Repair Disk Permissions. This will take just a minute or two. The disk permissions are also easily corrupted and repairing them will help alleviate problems.
Next, launch the Pro Tools software, then open the session you were working on. Pro Tools will be just a bit more sluggish opening up for the first time after you follow these steps; it has to rebuild the files that you just trashed. Pro Tools will set your preferences back to the factory presets.
The last step is to set your session settings back to the way you like to work. For those of you that don’t live and breath Pro Tools tech geek stuff, here are some basic settings to restore:
1) Under Options> turn on Quick Punch and Mute Frees Assigned Voice. Also, make sure your Delay Compensation is set as you want it. On if you’re mixing, Off if you’re recording.
2)Go to Setup> I/O and make sure your I/O settings are back to normal. How you set them will depend on the type and number of I/O’s you have.
3) Under Setup>Preferences>Display turn off Tools and Tips. I don’t know about you, but the constant pop up bubbles drive me nuts!
4) Under Setup>Preferences>Operation choose Record Online at Insertion Selection. For Open Ended Record Allocation Select Limit to XX Minutes. Set the number of minutes to the maximum amount of time that you would ever need to record a song, for most people that would be 10 minutes. Lastly, make sure that AutoSave is turned on.
5) Under Setup>Preferences>Editing change Conversion Quality to Tweakhead (Slowest).
6) If you have Pitch N Time or another TC/E plug-in, under Setup>Preferences>Processing change the TC/E Plug-in back to the one you wish to use. If you don’t have an alternate TC/E program just leave this setting alone.
Now that you have set things back to normal you are all set to go. This may seem like a lot to go through but it is well worth it. You will have fewer crashes and less stress.
Take care,
Jed
Is your Pro Tools rig prone to crashes? One source of trouble for your rig are preferences. Certain changes you make to your Pro Tools session are stored in temporary files called preferences. For instance, when you change your hardware, playback engine, or preference settings, those changes are stored in preference files. When Pro Tools crashes, those preferences are easily corrupted. If you don’t get rid of them after a crash you are much more likely to experience more crashes until you do.
Note: PC users consult with digidesign about this before you do it. This is meant for mac users.
After a crash you should throw away the following files found in Home>Library>Preferences:
1)DAE Prefs
2)Digisetup.OSX
3)Pro Tools v7.x Preferences
4)com.digidesign.ProToolsHD.plist
Next, on each hard drive connected to your system there is a folder called digidesign databases. Trash that as well. Don’t worry, Pro Tools will rebuild all the files that you just trashed the next time you fire up the program.
Once you have thrown those files away, reboot your computer. When the mac reboots, it will repair any damage to the boot up drive before launching OSX.
After your mac reboots, open the disk utility program located in Applications>Utilities. You will notice that for each drive on your system the disk utility lists the technical name for the drive and underneath is the name you gave the drive when you formated it. For example 233.8 GB Maxtor 7Y250MO>Mac Drive. Click on the tech name for the drive so that it is highlighted and click Repair Disk Permissions. This will take just a minute or two. The disk permissions are also easily corrupted and repairing them will help alleviate problems.
Next, launch the Pro Tools software, then open the session you were working on. Pro Tools will be just a bit more sluggish opening up for the first time after you follow these steps; it has to rebuild the files that you just trashed. Pro Tools will set your preferences back to the factory presets.
The last step is to set your session settings back to the way you like to work. For those of you that don’t live and breath Pro Tools tech geek stuff, here are some basic settings to restore:
1) Under Options> turn on Quick Punch and Mute Frees Assigned Voice. Also, make sure your Delay Compensation is set as you want it. On if you’re mixing, Off if you’re recording.
2)Go to Setup> I/O and make sure your I/O settings are back to normal. How you set them will depend on the type and number of I/O’s you have.
3) Under Setup>Preferences>Display turn off Tools and Tips. I don’t know about you, but the constant pop up bubbles drive me nuts!
4) Under Setup>Preferences>Operation choose Record Online at Insertion Selection. For Open Ended Record Allocation Select Limit to XX Minutes. Set the number of minutes to the maximum amount of time that you would ever need to record a song, for most people that would be 10 minutes. Lastly, make sure that AutoSave is turned on.
5) Under Setup>Preferences>Editing change Conversion Quality to Tweakhead (Slowest).
6) If you have Pitch N Time or another TC/E plug-in, under Setup>Preferences>Processing change the TC/E Plug-in back to the one you wish to use. If you don’t have an alternate TC/E program just leave this setting alone.
Now that you have set things back to normal you are all set to go. This may seem like a lot to go through but it is well worth it. You will have fewer crashes and less stress.
Take care,
Jed
Thursday, December 6, 2007
tool thursday, with jed hackett...
Clean Up Your Room! Or in This Case, Session.
So you’ve got your tracks cut, overdubs complete, and things are all tweaked up and ready to be shipped off to your favorite mix engineer. Let’s talk about a few things you should do to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier.
First of all, save your mix as My Song for (some engineer with three names) so that when you clean things up you don’t lose your original files. Now it’s time to do a little house cleaning. Get rid of every track that you are not using from your new session. Then remove every alternate playlist from the tracks that you are keeping. If you have a hidden playlist that you would like to include with your session, make a new track and bring that hidden playlist to the top layer of that track making sure you label it appropriately, like “Alternate guitar solo”. The idea is to only have the tracks that you want the mix engineer to use in the mix, in this session, with no alternate playlists.
The next part requires a little communication with your mix engineer. Find out what plug-ins they have on their rig. If you are using a plug-in that they do not have and it is critical to the sound of an instrument, say Guitar Rig or Amp Farm, then you should print a track for them with the audio processed by that plug-in. If you have soft synths like Trilogy or Stylus in your session, make sure you print those tracks as well. You may also have a chat with them about the size of your session and see if they would like you to submix any parts together, like the 16 tracks of Oohs you put in the chorus. See if they like automation and plug-ins left in the session. Some engineers like to build off what you already have going on and others just want a clean slate. If you use the comments field to leave notes about the tracks, make sure you leave that field open so they realize you have left comments. You may also want to warn them that they should look for the comments. It’s also not a bad idea to print a rough mix for the engineer so they know what you and the A&R department have gotten use to.
Now that you are on the same page with your mix engineer, it’s time to clean up the remaining tracks. Go through and check that all of your crossfades are clean… you did put in crossfades, didn’t you? Clear out any unwanted noises between phrases, check that you didn’t cut off any breaths on your lead vocal, etc. Once you are sure you have everything all neat and tidy, no laundry on the floor, go ahead and copy the first click of the song from the click track to every track that you have. This will give the mixer a fail safe way to line up your tracks if for some reason they aren’t lining up when he/she spots them in their session. ( And don’t be putting a click over some audio you intend to use at the top of the song! Make sure you paste these clicks before everything starts.) Now consolidate every track from the same start point to the end of the last piece of audio in the session. Once you so this, every track will have only one piece of audio, start and end at the same point in time, and have a click at the front just in case.
The next thing you need to do now that you have cleaned up all the clutter is to empty out the trash. Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, as I said before, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.
The final step is to Create a new folder on your drive entitled Ready to Mix and save a copy of your mix session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. Also check the box labeled Session Plug-in Settings Folder. If you don’t check these boxes, your audio files and plug-in settings won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.
Congratulations! You now have a very neat, organized and hopefully idiot proof session to send to your mix engineer. If you follow these steps you will quickly become one of their favorite clients. Cleaning things up like this can cut hours off of their set up time and leave them more time to do what they do best…mix. It may even translate into cheaper rates for you in the future!
Mixers, please write in with any other helpful advise on this subject. Thanks and see you next week.
Jed
So you’ve got your tracks cut, overdubs complete, and things are all tweaked up and ready to be shipped off to your favorite mix engineer. Let’s talk about a few things you should do to make everyone’s lives a little bit easier.
First of all, save your mix as My Song for (some engineer with three names) so that when you clean things up you don’t lose your original files. Now it’s time to do a little house cleaning. Get rid of every track that you are not using from your new session. Then remove every alternate playlist from the tracks that you are keeping. If you have a hidden playlist that you would like to include with your session, make a new track and bring that hidden playlist to the top layer of that track making sure you label it appropriately, like “Alternate guitar solo”. The idea is to only have the tracks that you want the mix engineer to use in the mix, in this session, with no alternate playlists.
The next part requires a little communication with your mix engineer. Find out what plug-ins they have on their rig. If you are using a plug-in that they do not have and it is critical to the sound of an instrument, say Guitar Rig or Amp Farm, then you should print a track for them with the audio processed by that plug-in. If you have soft synths like Trilogy or Stylus in your session, make sure you print those tracks as well. You may also have a chat with them about the size of your session and see if they would like you to submix any parts together, like the 16 tracks of Oohs you put in the chorus. See if they like automation and plug-ins left in the session. Some engineers like to build off what you already have going on and others just want a clean slate. If you use the comments field to leave notes about the tracks, make sure you leave that field open so they realize you have left comments. You may also want to warn them that they should look for the comments. It’s also not a bad idea to print a rough mix for the engineer so they know what you and the A&R department have gotten use to.
Now that you are on the same page with your mix engineer, it’s time to clean up the remaining tracks. Go through and check that all of your crossfades are clean… you did put in crossfades, didn’t you? Clear out any unwanted noises between phrases, check that you didn’t cut off any breaths on your lead vocal, etc. Once you are sure you have everything all neat and tidy, no laundry on the floor, go ahead and copy the first click of the song from the click track to every track that you have. This will give the mixer a fail safe way to line up your tracks if for some reason they aren’t lining up when he/she spots them in their session. ( And don’t be putting a click over some audio you intend to use at the top of the song! Make sure you paste these clicks before everything starts.) Now consolidate every track from the same start point to the end of the last piece of audio in the session. Once you so this, every track will have only one piece of audio, start and end at the same point in time, and have a click at the front just in case.
The next thing you need to do now that you have cleaned up all the clutter is to empty out the trash. Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, as I said before, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.
The final step is to Create a new folder on your drive entitled Ready to Mix and save a copy of your mix session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. Also check the box labeled Session Plug-in Settings Folder. If you don’t check these boxes, your audio files and plug-in settings won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.
Congratulations! You now have a very neat, organized and hopefully idiot proof session to send to your mix engineer. If you follow these steps you will quickly become one of their favorite clients. Cleaning things up like this can cut hours off of their set up time and leave them more time to do what they do best…mix. It may even translate into cheaper rates for you in the future!
Mixers, please write in with any other helpful advise on this subject. Thanks and see you next week.
Jed
Thursday, November 29, 2007
To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade? That is the Question.
Tool Thursday, with Jed Hackett
Leopard is here! Leopard is here! Everyone run down to your local Mac store and purchase the next large game cat! After all, we have had to struggle through with Tiger for an eternity. I mean it has been at least a year since we were able to upgrade from Panther or was it Cougar, Bobcat? God forbid we use that outdated dinosaur of an operating system they call Tiger. Is it just me? Or does everyone out there get sick of shelling out a few grand a year chasing the endless upgrades? OSX, Digi, Antares, Waves, Roxio, 1k Multimedia, Spectrasonics, McDSP, etc. And then there are all of the hardware upgrades as well. It seems like just as we make the leap to the next thing, get everything stable, sit down and get to work, we have to get right back up and jump again. And it all costs money! Everyone says “you can’t be afraid of change” but lets face it, we all hate it and fear it just a little. However, if you don’t play the game, in a few years, you aren’t in the game. So what do you do?
I guess first I need to fill you in on my career long angst. I know how to do good work, but if I don’t have the necessary tools how can I ensure quality work at every session? Do I buy gear, a DAW, or plug-ins and cart them around with me? If I do that, I shift the financial burden from my clients to myself. In other words, if I didn’t own it, they would have to rent it. But if I take that stand and don’t buy gear, I ultimately end up at a budget studio with no gear and I have to jump through hoops to get decent sounds. Then people who aren’t at the session hear the result and think I must not have the engineering chops. And that is no fun!
Everyone has to choose their own poison with this issue. I have made the decision to only purchase gear that will pay for itself or is just plain necessary. I upgrade my Pro Tools rig when there is some functionality that will save me time, or when I have had several requests from clients that require a particular plug in or Pro Tools version or another digi card etc. That way I ensure that I am not just buying a toy. I recommend you do the same so that you’ll have enough money left over to retire some day.
There is actually a great side effect to purchasing computer gear this way. There are so many different entities involved in the writing of software and they all race to stay on the cutting edge. Digi, Mac, and all of the plug in companies push software out the door before it is completely debugged. Even if they all do their best to write good code, they are all writing at the same time chasing a moving target.
Every time you upgrade it takes a while to get things to settle down and stabilize. Once you get to a point that things are stable, you should stay there as long as you can without becoming obsolete. I’ll give you an example- I upgraded to Pro Tools v7.1 and had a really stable system for a long time. As v7.2 came out, I stayed where I was with no problems. Many of my friends upgraded to 7.2 right away and got caught up in the disappearing regions bug. Then 7.3 came out and digi said all is well, jump to 7.3. They still hadn’t fixed the disappearing regions bug entirely and they also introduced a few more errors in the program. It was a rather frustrating 6 months to a year for many engineers. I was perfectly happy at 7.1 the whole time, but then as 7.3 came out I started having compatibility issues with some of my clients that were on 7.3 using the new VCA groups. I just dealt with it for a while by having those clients save me sessions as 6.9 files. When I got the word from my friends that they no longer had disappearing regions with 7.3.1 I made the jump.
I know it is always tempting to dive right in to the new OSX or Pro Tools version as soon as it comes out , but trust me, give them a little while to figure out the bugs and jump in on 7.3.1 instead of 7.3 or 7.4.1 instead of 7.4. Get the idea?
My next bit of advice in upgrading is to visit the digi site and make sure you are running on an approved operating system and that your plug ins are compatible for the particular version of Pro Tools software that you are installing. Here are a few links for you- OSX compatibility and plug in compatibility. Doing this will make your life much easier.
Last but not least comes the hardware upgrades. When you jump to that next computer, make sure Digi has approved it before you by it, or you may never have a stable system. Here are a few links to the Digi approved computers- G5’s , Intel Macs. You may have to wait a bit before buying the latest greatest computer so that Digi can have some time to approve it but you’ll be happy you waited.
Upgrading is like walking through a minefield in a war zone. Move too quickly and you’re dead. Stay still and your dead. Tread slowly and carefully through the minefield and you may make it to the other side intact. And if you do hit a mine at least you gave it your best shot.
Thanks for reading my rant. Please write in with any comments or stories you have about upgrading. ‘Till next time, Take care.
Jed Hackett
Leopard is here! Leopard is here! Everyone run down to your local Mac store and purchase the next large game cat! After all, we have had to struggle through with Tiger for an eternity. I mean it has been at least a year since we were able to upgrade from Panther or was it Cougar, Bobcat? God forbid we use that outdated dinosaur of an operating system they call Tiger. Is it just me? Or does everyone out there get sick of shelling out a few grand a year chasing the endless upgrades? OSX, Digi, Antares, Waves, Roxio, 1k Multimedia, Spectrasonics, McDSP, etc. And then there are all of the hardware upgrades as well. It seems like just as we make the leap to the next thing, get everything stable, sit down and get to work, we have to get right back up and jump again. And it all costs money! Everyone says “you can’t be afraid of change” but lets face it, we all hate it and fear it just a little. However, if you don’t play the game, in a few years, you aren’t in the game. So what do you do?
I guess first I need to fill you in on my career long angst. I know how to do good work, but if I don’t have the necessary tools how can I ensure quality work at every session? Do I buy gear, a DAW, or plug-ins and cart them around with me? If I do that, I shift the financial burden from my clients to myself. In other words, if I didn’t own it, they would have to rent it. But if I take that stand and don’t buy gear, I ultimately end up at a budget studio with no gear and I have to jump through hoops to get decent sounds. Then people who aren’t at the session hear the result and think I must not have the engineering chops. And that is no fun!
Everyone has to choose their own poison with this issue. I have made the decision to only purchase gear that will pay for itself or is just plain necessary. I upgrade my Pro Tools rig when there is some functionality that will save me time, or when I have had several requests from clients that require a particular plug in or Pro Tools version or another digi card etc. That way I ensure that I am not just buying a toy. I recommend you do the same so that you’ll have enough money left over to retire some day.
There is actually a great side effect to purchasing computer gear this way. There are so many different entities involved in the writing of software and they all race to stay on the cutting edge. Digi, Mac, and all of the plug in companies push software out the door before it is completely debugged. Even if they all do their best to write good code, they are all writing at the same time chasing a moving target.
Every time you upgrade it takes a while to get things to settle down and stabilize. Once you get to a point that things are stable, you should stay there as long as you can without becoming obsolete. I’ll give you an example- I upgraded to Pro Tools v7.1 and had a really stable system for a long time. As v7.2 came out, I stayed where I was with no problems. Many of my friends upgraded to 7.2 right away and got caught up in the disappearing regions bug. Then 7.3 came out and digi said all is well, jump to 7.3. They still hadn’t fixed the disappearing regions bug entirely and they also introduced a few more errors in the program. It was a rather frustrating 6 months to a year for many engineers. I was perfectly happy at 7.1 the whole time, but then as 7.3 came out I started having compatibility issues with some of my clients that were on 7.3 using the new VCA groups. I just dealt with it for a while by having those clients save me sessions as 6.9 files. When I got the word from my friends that they no longer had disappearing regions with 7.3.1 I made the jump.
I know it is always tempting to dive right in to the new OSX or Pro Tools version as soon as it comes out , but trust me, give them a little while to figure out the bugs and jump in on 7.3.1 instead of 7.3 or 7.4.1 instead of 7.4. Get the idea?
My next bit of advice in upgrading is to visit the digi site and make sure you are running on an approved operating system and that your plug ins are compatible for the particular version of Pro Tools software that you are installing. Here are a few links for you- OSX compatibility and plug in compatibility. Doing this will make your life much easier.
Last but not least comes the hardware upgrades. When you jump to that next computer, make sure Digi has approved it before you by it, or you may never have a stable system. Here are a few links to the Digi approved computers- G5’s , Intel Macs. You may have to wait a bit before buying the latest greatest computer so that Digi can have some time to approve it but you’ll be happy you waited.
Upgrading is like walking through a minefield in a war zone. Move too quickly and you’re dead. Stay still and your dead. Tread slowly and carefully through the minefield and you may make it to the other side intact. And if you do hit a mine at least you gave it your best shot.
Thanks for reading my rant. Please write in with any comments or stories you have about upgrading. ‘Till next time, Take care.
Jed Hackett
Thursday, November 15, 2007
tool thursday, with jed hackett...
Hello everyone! I have been asked by the powers that be to head up a weekly column on the esession.com blog called “Tool Thursdays”. I’ll be talking everything Pro Tools... editing tricks, session management, how best to format your audio when sharing files with musicians and engineers through esession.com, etc. Some articles will be targeted toward the musicians and artists using the site. Other articles may be more useful to you engineers out there, so keep checking in weekly and I’m sure you’ll find something useful. Most importantly, this should be a collaborative effort. I’m just a fellow engineer working in the trenches. Everything I know comes from either finding things out the hard way or advice from friends in the business, so please write in with any useful information or commentary you may have on a particular topic. The first few articles are going to be about session organization with respect to using esession.com. Hopefully they will help you all save time, hassle and maybe even money when working through the site. Once I get through some of the basics with esession.com I’ll get more into tricks of the trade type stuff. That said... here we go!
Let’s talk first about how to format your files when you are using esession.com to send them to a musician for an overdub. The simpler you make things, the easier it will be for the musician you hire to download the files and get moving with your overdubs. That will save the musician time and hassle, and save you money in the future because the musician will know on future projects that you have your act together and they won’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you sent them.
When sending files to a musician through esession.com, make some submixes so that the musician has a little bit of control over what they hear yet they don’t have to doanload and import every one of your tracks. Not all of us may have a blazing fast internet connection and we don’t want to be uploading and downloading things for an hour.
Note: Make sure you read and understand all of this clearly or you may accidentally erase your files!
1)The first thing you should do is save your session under a new name like- “Song Name” for John Doe ODs. That way you won’t mess up your session and lose all of your hard work. I can’t overstate how important this step is!! Don’t follow the rest of these instructions until you have done this!
2) Set up a rough mix as you like it, then create new stereo audio tracks and label them Drum Stem, Bass Stem, Guitar Stem, Keys Stem, Vocal Stem etc. Obviously the Bass could be mono. Make it as few stems as you can while leaving the musician a little room to tweak things as they want to hear them. Also, ask the musician if they have a preference as to how you set up the stems. For example, I work with a percussionist here in Nashville that likes to have the acoustic guitar printed separately from everything else.
3) Bus the drums to the drum stem track, guitars to the guitar stem track, etc.
4) Print the tracks. By making your stems this way, all the musician will have to do is place every tracks’ volume at zero and they will get your mix, yet they can adjust things if need be.
5) Select every track in your session that is not a stem track or the click and delete them from this new session that you created. You will be getting rid of all of your original tracks, leaving just the stems and click.
6) Delete all unused playlists from the session. In the playlist menu next to one of your track’s name select delete unused to clear out all unused playlists.
7) Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.
Note: You should now be left with only your stems and click within this new session.
8) Cut and paste the first click from the click track to every stem. On a few occasions I have found this useful when for some reason the audio time stamp gets messed up. As a last resort your musician can use the click at the top of each track to line up all of the tracks in their DAW.
9) Consolidate all of your stems with the click at the front, making sure you do so from the same start point on every track. To do this, in the edit window, highlight every track from the same start position to the end of the song and choose Consolidate under the Edit menu. It may also be helpful to do so in grid mode if you are using a grid.
10) Remove all unused audio again from the session. In the Regions menu choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove, not “delete”!
11) Create a new folder on you drive entitled Esession Stems for Musician, or something like that.
12) Save a copy of your stem session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. If you don’t check that box, your audio files won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.
Note: When the musician sends you back the tracks they recorded for you, have them place the same click at the front of their overdub tracks to ensure you have a fail-safe incase the time stamp is off. I’m sure we all have forgotten to spot a track at least once in our careers.
You should now have a very neat and orderly session with only the audio that you intend to send to the musician. If they are using Pro Tools, you can send them the entire session folder and they are good to go. If they are on another DAW, you can send them the audio files in the audio files folder and all they will have to do is import them into a session, spot them to the correct time stamp location and start overdubbing. No Hassles! No irate phone calls or e-mails!
I hope this is helpful to everyone. Please write in if you have any other comments on this subject.
Take care,
Jed Hackett
etalent engineer (editing) esession.com/jedhackett
Let’s talk first about how to format your files when you are using esession.com to send them to a musician for an overdub. The simpler you make things, the easier it will be for the musician you hire to download the files and get moving with your overdubs. That will save the musician time and hassle, and save you money in the future because the musician will know on future projects that you have your act together and they won’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you sent them.
When sending files to a musician through esession.com, make some submixes so that the musician has a little bit of control over what they hear yet they don’t have to doanload and import every one of your tracks. Not all of us may have a blazing fast internet connection and we don’t want to be uploading and downloading things for an hour.
Note: Make sure you read and understand all of this clearly or you may accidentally erase your files!
1)The first thing you should do is save your session under a new name like- “Song Name” for John Doe ODs. That way you won’t mess up your session and lose all of your hard work. I can’t overstate how important this step is!! Don’t follow the rest of these instructions until you have done this!
2) Set up a rough mix as you like it, then create new stereo audio tracks and label them Drum Stem, Bass Stem, Guitar Stem, Keys Stem, Vocal Stem etc. Obviously the Bass could be mono. Make it as few stems as you can while leaving the musician a little room to tweak things as they want to hear them. Also, ask the musician if they have a preference as to how you set up the stems. For example, I work with a percussionist here in Nashville that likes to have the acoustic guitar printed separately from everything else.
3) Bus the drums to the drum stem track, guitars to the guitar stem track, etc.
4) Print the tracks. By making your stems this way, all the musician will have to do is place every tracks’ volume at zero and they will get your mix, yet they can adjust things if need be.
5) Select every track in your session that is not a stem track or the click and delete them from this new session that you created. You will be getting rid of all of your original tracks, leaving just the stems and click.
6) Delete all unused playlists from the session. In the playlist menu next to one of your track’s name select delete unused to clear out all unused playlists.
7) Remove all unused audio from the session. In the Regions menu within the Edit window choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove. If you choose “delete” instead, all of your files will go into the intergalactic bit bucket, never to be heard again.
Note: You should now be left with only your stems and click within this new session.
8) Cut and paste the first click from the click track to every stem. On a few occasions I have found this useful when for some reason the audio time stamp gets messed up. As a last resort your musician can use the click at the top of each track to line up all of the tracks in their DAW.
9) Consolidate all of your stems with the click at the front, making sure you do so from the same start point on every track. To do this, in the edit window, highlight every track from the same start position to the end of the song and choose Consolidate under the Edit menu. It may also be helpful to do so in grid mode if you are using a grid.
10) Remove all unused audio again from the session. In the Regions menu choose Select> Unused. Then choose Clear. This next part is very important! When prompted, choose Remove, not “delete”!
11) Create a new folder on you drive entitled Esession Stems for Musician, or something like that.
12) Save a copy of your stem session, with the audio, into that new folder you just created. In the Pro Tools menu, under File, choose Save Copy In. When the copy window opens up, next to “Where:”, find the folder you just created, check the box under Items to Copy labeled All Audio files. If you don’t check that box, your audio files won’t be copied along with the session. Click Save.
Note: When the musician sends you back the tracks they recorded for you, have them place the same click at the front of their overdub tracks to ensure you have a fail-safe incase the time stamp is off. I’m sure we all have forgotten to spot a track at least once in our careers.
You should now have a very neat and orderly session with only the audio that you intend to send to the musician. If they are using Pro Tools, you can send them the entire session folder and they are good to go. If they are on another DAW, you can send them the audio files in the audio files folder and all they will have to do is import them into a session, spot them to the correct time stamp location and start overdubbing. No Hassles! No irate phone calls or e-mails!
I hope this is helpful to everyone. Please write in if you have any other comments on this subject.
Take care,
Jed Hackett
etalent engineer (editing) esession.com/jedhackett
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