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All information in these pages is copyright (c) 1989-2003 by Roger Nichols. All rights reserved. Permission for personal reference only, and may not be reproduced by any method without written permission.

2001, Space Odyssey
by Roger Nichols

I have been waiting for the 24 hour 2001 channel. I figured out that in the year 2001 you could play the movie” 2001” exactly 2001 times with some space for commercials. The commercials would undoubtedly be for the 24 hour “2010” channel to be launched in 9 years to show Stanley Kubrick’s sequel.

In my mastering/mixing room has become a space odyssey of its own. I have no space for all of the stuff that I can’t seem to get rid of. Some outboard gear has been gathering dust for five years or more, but just when I get ready to get rid of it, some problem arises that only this obsolete piece of gear will solve. This, of course, justifies hanging on to everything forever. I have come up with a temporary solution. I tell my wife “This gear will help you with your demos, so I’ll just leave it here in your room, ok?” This is working for now, but she is starting to ask questions about all of the gear piling up on her side of the house. I hope she doesn’t read my column this month.

Hard Disks Are Free

Well, almost free. Considering that one year ago I paid $1800 for 18 gigabyte SCSI hard disks, $199 is basically free. (I wont even tell you about the 45 megabyte drive I bought in 1983 for $5995, or the 5 megabyte drive that was $3995 in 1980.) 80 gigabyte ATAPI drives are now $349. Seagate just announced a new 180 gigabyte drive due out soon. Samples are available now.

Hard disks are now cheaper than two inch analog or reel to reel digital tape. Removable drive bays now allow you to plug in the disk drive, record your music, and when you are done, unplug the drive and put it on the shelf. New project? Just plug in a new drive.
Many of the disk based multi-track machines like the Mackie 24/96 save their files in native DAW formats so that you can plug the drive into your DAW and read the audio directly. The Mackie also has an Ethernet connection for transfer of audio between the 24/96 and any networked computer.

I am waiting for Sony to produce a professional 48 track (or more) digital recorder that is hard disk or optical disk based. This milestone will surely mark the end of tape based recording as far as I am concerned.

The worst thing about tape is that you cannot slip tracks around to make them earlier or copy choruses to other choruses without a second machine. Also, the best thing about tape is that you cannot slip tracks around to make them earlier. There is a syndrome I like to call “middle finger mouse reflex” that affects most DAW users. As you are repositioning the mouse from one corner of the computer screen to another corner of the computer screen, your middle finger sometimes reflexively clicks the mouse button. If the mouse pointer was passing over an empty area of the screen, then no problem. You just pause for a second, shake your hand in the air, clench your fingers, and go on about your business. If, on the other hand, the mouse pointer was passing over a region of audio, that region would be dragged from its original position by some arbitrary amount. If you noticed the finger twitch, then everything is fine… you just click “undo” and go back to work. If you did not notice the errant click until after your next editing action, you are dead meat. Some region that you did not notice was moved, and you don’t know by how much. You can’t reposition all of the regions in that area to their original time code, because they were all moved anyway in the course of editing. I like to use tape as my ‘reference master’ during a project. If I have a question about relative position between tracks, I can recapture the tracks from tape and compare their position. This method has saved my butt on more than a few occasions.

From Disk to Disc

Basically I think that two things need to happen before tape is dead. First, optical disk technology needs to improve by a couple orders of magnitude. There is a new technology called F

EM recording that is based on photo-luminescence. This technology allows 100-200 gigabytes to be recorded on a single DVD type disc. DVDs are less susceptible to damage from travel and storage than tape or hard disk. Second, updates in software to allow multiple time stamps of data so that once a region has been positioned in the desired location, a local time stamp (in addition to the original time stamp) will assure that a region that was accidentally moved can be repositioned with the purposeful click of the mouse.
Until optical technology catches up and spawns inexpensive DVD based multi track recorders, tape machines like DA-88s and ADATs will remain the medium of choice for most project studios throughout the world. Tape still allows digital recording technology for a massive amount of album product that is released every year.
I get projects to mix from South America frequently. Twenty percent of the projects I receive are on DA-88 tapes, sixty five percent are on ADAT tapes, and ten percent are Pro Tools files on CD-ROM. None are sent on hard disk or reel to reel multi track formats. In Caracas there are many small project studios with one ADAT machine. Producers move around from studio to studio with their ADAT tapes. Recording a guitar here, a horn section there… and once in a while they have to go to a larger studio to make more slave tapes so they can continue to record overdubs in project studios that only have one or two ADATs to work with. These machines get lots of work, too. When I was in Caracas last year it was very hard to find an ADAT machine with less than 8000 head hours. The hour meters on most of the machines I saw were pegged at 9999 hours. That is a lot of music.

Project Update

I have been upgrading my little studio, and have been working in other project studios in Florida.
I have just finished mixing an album in a project studio in the Tampa area. The artist was Gumbi Ortiz, a percussionist. The producer was Dan O’Brien. A MOTU 2408 setup with Digital Performer. Some of the mixing is done with the volume automation in Digital Performer, and then stems are sent out to a Panasonic DA-7 where they are combined and sent to an Alesis Masterlink. The studio has two isolation booths for overdubs when necessary.

I helped an artist/ producer named Ariel Remos finish up his album. His Miami project studio is Pro Tools monitored through a Mackie analog console. Recording is done through external mic preamps directly into Pro Tools. The console is just for monitoring and all of the mixing is done in Pro Tools.

My studio has added a pair of Mackie 24/96 recorders and a Sony DMX-R100 console. I have been dumping projects into Pro Tools from my six ADAT M-20 machines. I then mix in both Pro Tools and the Sony board. I use plug-ins in Pro Tools and use the volume automation for vocal rides and such. Each track is then fed to the Sony for EQ and reverb sends. From there the mix is printed on Alesis Masterlink.
Life is good, but new equipment makes it even better.