I have noticed that more and more of my time during the last six months has been spent working on MDM (Modular Digital Multitrack) tape machines. Many artists, producers, and studios are using ADAT and DA-88 format machines for commercially released products.

Right now I am involved in two projects that are ADAT based. One of the projects is a jazz tribute to James Taylor featuring artists like Pancho Sanchez, Flora Purim, and Don Grusin. The producer is Tim Weston who has cut plenty of albums on both analog and digital machines. Tim prefers the clean natural sound of digital (if he wants to remain my friend, that is). Budgets for jazz albums these days do not include the extra expense of renting a 32 track or 48 track digital machine. You can save about $600 to $800 per day by renting 32 tracks of ADAT. And, because of the modularity, you can add more tracks just by plugging in another machine, or ejecting the tape with all of the guitar solos and sticking in a blank one for the sax solos.

For that extra little zip, I usually bring my Apogee converters to feed the ADAT that is going to record the lead vocal or piano tracks. If someone snidely remarks “You’re recording on ADATs?” I reply “Yeah, but were feeding them with 64 bit Apogees!” This project will probably be mixed at my mastering room with a pair of O2Rs.

The second project is mixing an Indian artist named Yesudas at the producers home studio in Pasadena. A lot of the recordings were done in India where ADAT is the standard recording format. Overdubs were done at the producers house, then I came in to mix. Initially we were going to go to a commercial facility that had a Neve or SSL and bring a stack of ADATs, but after hearing some material played back at the project studio, we decided to get a couple of O2Rs and mix at the house.

Some of the tunes contained 48 tracks of material. The studio has five ADATs and an eight track Protools system powered by Logic Audio. For the full tilt 48 track songs, we ran the five ADATs and the Protools in sync feeding the pair of O2Rs digitally. This setup worked especially well if we needed to edit anything, or if there were more ADAT tapes than there were ADATS. Using the O2R for routing and level control, we transferred eight tracks at a time through the Protools 888/IO, edited, and transferred back to ADAT.

MOTU MTP AV

Try saying that ten times fast. The biggest headache when trying to make all of this stuff work together is getting everything to run in sync with just one controller running the whole show. In the past, I have usually run Protools as the slave and located the ADATs with the BRC remote. Much of the time it works, but sometimes it doesn’t, especially when you are transferring multiple tracks of digital audio. When you transfer in one direction one guy wants to be the master, but if you have to go in the other direction, the other guy wants to be in control. It’s always something. The other problem that pops up is SMPTE or MTC that needs to be routed around to tell all of the machines, including the O2R automation, where the are time-wise.

The central sync source for this particular project studio is the Mark Of The Unicorn MIDI Time Piece AV. It connects directly to the Mac containing the Protools hardware taking the place of the Mac to MIDI interface. There is also a PC interface for those less fortunate (but I guess more numerous) Intel lovers.

We used the Mac with Logic Audio as the controller. We told Logic the bar number we wanted to go to, and Logic told the MTP. The MTP sent MTC to the O2Rs, sent SMPTE to the time code DAT, sent Digidesign Superclock to the 888/IO interface, and ADAT sync out the 9 pin ADAT sync connector. There is even an eight in/ eight out MIDI router built in for the Logic Audio MIDI tracks. MIDI Machine control told the ADATs where to shuttle to, and Logic waited until all of the ADATs were parked before the play command was issued. Completely synchronized playback usually took only two seconds, and it worked every time. What a nice piece of gear the MTP AV is. I was told that there is another version of the MTP that includes DA-88 sync if you are so inclined.

So What’s The Point?

Anyway, the reason I bring up all this MDM stuff is to focus on TAPE BACKUPS for your precious recordings. No matter how good the machine is, sooner or later it is going to eat your tape. 3M machines have dined on my tapes, Sonys have lunched on my oxide, all usually just before I was about to make backups. The more you shuttle back and forth, play, stop, rewind a few seconds, play some more... You get the picture. During the two weeks of mixing the Indian project, five tapes were eaten by the machines, but no time was lost because the producer religiously made backups of all of the tapes. Before the mixes started, he made three copies of each tape. That’s 9 songs times 5 tapes per song times 4 copies of each (the original and 3 copies). That is 180 tapes. But just think about how much cheaper the tape is than renting the studio and paying the musicians to re-cut what you lost.

Back in the analog Steely Dan days, we never made copies, because an analog tape copy was so inferior that we never wanted to be tempted to use it. One day a tape got erased. It cost over $40,000 to try to cut the song again, but it never came out good enough to use. If digital recording had just come two years earlier.

NAMM

Did you enjoy the NAMM show? I just found out what NAMM stands for. Not Available, Maybe March, or Maybe May. I guess that would be NAMMMM. Oh well.

Yamaha O2R

I have been getting a lot of questions in my e-mail about O2R tips. I plan on adding some every month or so. Maybe March. Most tips pertain to mixing in general and can be applied to other digital consoles as well.

Q: I go through a lot of effort to get the levels as hot as possible without clipping when I record on my digital machine, but when I mix, all of the faders end up near the bottom and it seems like I don’t have much control over mixing levels.

A. Analog and digital consoles both have line trims that allow you to turn the level down as it enters the console so that the mixing fader can be run in the “sweet spot” which is around Zero or -5 dB. Automation in consoles doesn’t know about dB, it just moves the fader a certain number of steps from all the way down, to all the way up. On a Neve Capricorn, or Flying Faders, or an SSL, or GML automation there are 1024 steps. On an O2R there are 118 steps. On a Sony Oxford there are about 2000 steps (those little buggers were hard to count). When the fader is in the “sweet spot” a step of fader movement can be less than a tenth of a dB. When the fader is down near -30 dB or -40 dB, that same step can be 1 dB or 10 dB. It would be very hard to ride a vocal when the smallest fader move is 10 dB.

On the O2R the trim is located on the EQ page and is stored as part of a snapshot. This control is not automated, so you can change it while the mix is running. The increments are in whole dB steps, but it can let you try ballpark level tweaks without messing up your mix.

Out-O-Hear

That’s it for now kids, also note my Web site has changed location. I am going to be doing some work on it, a new garden, extra parking, a new stainless steel Bar-B-Q, that sort of thing. It is now www.rogernichols.com.