Prometheus

That's exactly my plan too...

This. I tried using Linux because I very much like the principles behind the Open Source movement, but for pro audio work, it just didn't cut it. Setting up a windows computer as a multitrack studio is easy, the issues have all been ironed out for over ten years now. As has been pointed out, Windows computers are more prone to viruses than Linux or MAC, but who in their right mind is going to connect the computer they use as their multitrack recording studio to the NET or plug unscanned removeable media into it? Even in the worst case scenario, anyone who can handle setting up a linux distro is going to be able to reinstall XP with one hand on the wheel. Before anyone says that they only have one PC they use for all purposes because the costs of running their dilapidated cottage in rural Cornwall makes purchasing a second one prohibative, you can go to your local dump these days and find a PC that's capable of running as a mutltrack recorder and mixer with ease, and you can pick up a 24 bit sound card for $50.00, which wouldn't even finance a single night out.

Sound engineers live on their reputation and that's as good as the last product they made. I would have been very reluctant in agreeing to mix tracks that someone else had recorded and I'd never heard. You only have to listen to the difference between studio productions compared to live recordings and bootlegs to see the difference it makes having the tracking done by a pro engineer in a pro studio.

I certainly wasn't meaning to come across as acusing you of cheerleeding for MAC's. I don't think most sound engineers are particularly computer savvy, it just happens that I've spent a few years repairing PC's for work and picked up a few tradesman's tricks. Whoever repaired your machine and didn't bother to recover your data either didn't realise that you wanted data recovered or else he or she took a very lazy approach. There are a couple of pieces of sound advice to be given on this for MAC or PC users. 1) Always make backups. I have two hard drives in my multitrack recorder so that when I'm working on a mix I can have two copies of the mix folder stored indepently of each other. This means that a double hard disk failure would be required to lose any data. Given that all my PC's are run on surge protectors, the chances of the two hard disks being destroyed simulateneously are infinitecimal barring a calamity that would make the mixes I'm currently working on the least of my worries. Even so, I keep copies of all my finished work on CD or DVD. This also increases performance as you can record to and mix from one hard disk and have your operating system on the other one. 2) If you're using one hard disk, partition it so that the operating system and your data are stored on different partitions that the computer will treat as seperate drives. That way, if your operating system becomes corrupt for whatever reason, you can restore the computer with OS installation disks after formating the partition with the OS on it and not lose any of your work. 3) Hard disks are easy to remove from one computer and connect to another one. If you lose the capability to boot from a hard disk because of a Virus, take the hard disk out of the infected computer, set it as a slave and you can daisy chain it to the hard disk on another computer. That way you can retrieve your work without data loss. 4) With an NT based windows system, anything from 2000 to Windows 7, if you haven't partitoned your drive and lose the capability to boot from it and you are not confident in opening the case and unplugging hard disks, Windows gives the option to install a new OS alongside the existing one. This will allow you to retreive your data. Once that is safely backed up, you can then format the drive and reinstall windows on a freshly formatted hard disk. 5) Always run your PC's through a surge protected 4 gang (or surge protected block with however many sockets you need).

I've never actually ran a stop watch on it, but I'm pretty sure Cubase can do that on my PC in seconds as well. Whoever repaired the PC for you should have been able to recover the data with absolutely no difficulty whatsoever in that situation. In fact, if you partition your hard disk, this problem can be prevented from ever occurring. MAC operating systems are less susceptible to virus problems than windows, which is not to say that windows in the only choice to run on a PC. As someone said at the top of this page, Hackintosh. I can't envisage a situation where I would ever connect my multitrack recorder to the internet or plug any storage medium into it without scanning it first on my general use machine. Consequently, I am not worried about infection by a virus.

A very good point raised here.

I hadn't heard about this, but it doesn't suprise me. I'd heard in the UK they wanted to extend copyright so that the companies could milk it for a lot longer but I didn't hear of it being passed. You couldn't make up some of the things these people get up to. Personally, I think restricted works, after a reasonable period of time for profit to be made, should go into the public domain where they can benefit mankind rather than being used to part people from their money.

While what is being said in the above post is technically true, the sound engineer would only be co-owner of the sound recording, he would not actually be a co-writer of the song. If you record a demo and someone wants to publish, perform or give you a contract on the basis of it, the piece is going to be re-recorded anyway. I'm not from the USA, but I've never actually heard of a case in the UK of a sound engineer trying to pull a mechanical copyright stunt like this on someone he had recorded a demo for. Any sound engineer who had a reputation for this kind of thing would quickly find that no one would employ him or her. Copyright exists from the moment you first put down your work in a tangible format. If you are worried about theft of your song, record it on a four track and put it on reverbnation before you have it mixed by the engineer.

I've approached a studio about doing it the other way, tracking in the studio and then taking the tracks away to mix them (because my studio is in my flat and playing drums is out of the question). The engineer I approached refused to do it, despite the fact that I was a pro engineer at the time. What he did let us do was bring in an eight track hard disk recorder and use his acoustically treated room. I think you'll find that some engineers would be amenable to your idea and other's not.

Exactly. One of the most pernicious myths of the modern era is that free markets lead to choice. They lead to monopoly, always. Music is a prime example of this, where a vanishingly small number of people have all the money that's to be made. I would love to see the regulations that all other industries have to adhere to, like the National Minimum Wage ACT 1999 for example, enforced in the music industry. I'd love to see A & R guys who claim that it's too hard work to listen to a track for more than thirty seconds being drop kicked out the door like they would be in any other industry. In the old days, they used to actually go out on the circuit and scout for bands, now they can't even listen to a CD. The industry as it is now doesn't deserve to survive digital piracy. It's truly pathetic.

An excellent article.... Concise and informative.

That sounds to me like you might be trying to overdo the number of mix elements you have.

As an interesting aside, TTS is clear evidence that people who listen to music at high sound pressure levels are imbeciles. Not only are they setting themselves up for tinitus and notches in the spectral domain of their hearing when they get older, but the muscles of the ossicular chain simply relax so that within a few minutes they no longer percieve the loud music as being loud. I know most people in their teens and early twenties think that by the time they're forty, bad hearing will be the least of their worries because they'll be too arthritic and decrepit to operate studio equipment anyway, but take heed! When you approach middle age, giving up producing music may well be far from your mind.

I would agree with that 100% as well... I made the mistake of writing a dozen songs and releasing all my songs at once... I got a bit of radio airplay, a small amount of royalites on Reverbnation but after this I had already put everything out and had nothing to follow up with...

I've used the Kjaerous Classic Compressor. The metering isn't as good as the Waves Compressor, but it's pretty versatile, giving you manual control over the knee which is something you don't get with a lot of compressors. With practice and tweaking, you can get excellent results with it. I've actually used Kjaerous plugins on commercial projects with pro musicians and never had any complaints. The Chorus one in particular I think is excellent. I'll be here, just give me a shout. There are actually articles on the site by John and by myself about compression that you might find helpful too...

Quite honsetly, if I were to link you to my songs, I'd be willing to bet that no one here or anywhere could tell you which elements I used outboards on and which were compressed with the wave bundle. 5% of what gets results is the quality of the compressor. The other 95% is down to the experience of the guy using it. If you were to take a seasoned engineer with 1000 studio sessions under his belt and put him in my little project studio against a guy who was two minutes out of college but had Abbey Road at his disposal, the experienced guy in my studio would do better, even if I let him use nothing but plugins. Saturation is a form of peak compression. The signal is compressed at a massive ratio when the trim is pegged with the dynamic range limit acting as a threshold. Unless you're in serious financial hardship, I would strongly advise you to buy a Behringer Composer Pro... They're cheap as dirt and they're excellent.

One I've come across that is up to pro standards is the Waves Compressor, but it's not free. Personally, I like that one so much that I use it on everything. The only thing I always use analogue compressors on is bass guitar lines, then I reshape them again with the waves compressor. http://www.waves.com...ent.aspx?id=171 I would defy anyone to tell the difference between that and an analogue unit in a mix Alternatively, you can pick up a Behringer Composer Pro for less than a hundred dollars. Every studio should have a Behringer Composer in it. I've just bought a dbx compressor this weekend, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Despite what I'm about to say next, I think we're all getting far too technology oriented in mixing. I think the performance aspect of mixing has been lost in the modern era and the mixes of today are far too flat. I think it's better psychoacoustically if they have edges to them. In order to make my mixes stand alongside aforementioned modern products, I would recompress the audio sample loops to reshape the peaks. Not too much, maybe just shaving two or three decibels. A mix sounds a lot tighter if the compressor release settings on all the individual tracks are a related to each other as a function of rational numbers. Most sound engineers, even pro ones, have a tendency just to twiddle the attack and release times until they think it sounds pretty. Personally, I always walk the extra mile and do the maths. 60,000 / BPM = time of each quarter beat in milliseconds. By dividing or multiplying this number by two until it falls into the parameters you want, you can have a tight, tempo based mix.

I think you're going to find getting signed under those conditions very difficult. If you don't do gigs, you won't get signed. Even if you do gigs, it's a very competitive industry where you're swimming with the sharks. You could try going the way of getting a publishing deal, but the same caveat applies. Good luck with that. I think you'll find that's an oxymoron.

Thanks for the feedback guys. Much appreciated...

MAudio for me... I've been using MAudio interfaces for ten years now, the Delta 1010.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that particular software.

You must be doing something a lot more processor intensive than audio editing then... Anyone who can't record, edit and mix audio with a 1Ghz processor and a half gig of memory or above is not doing it right. Even in terms of processing power, a high end PC will always give you more than a MAC. The open hardware configuration of PC's induces far more competition and ensures they always stay on top.

You're on the right track... Small moves... Don't just slap a multiband enhancer or compressor on the mixdown because it's there, think about whether it actually needs it. The only time I've ever had to use multiband compression is when the kick drum and bass guitar have been badly compressed at the mixing stage. I've used a multiband enhancer to restore damaged tapes where the top end of the spectral domain has been lost to oxide shedding, but in configuring a well mixed track so that it's going to sound good on a CD player, usually all it needs is EQ tweaks and a bit of stone wall limiting. I would strongly recommend using subtractive EQ whenever possible. Do parametric sweeps and take out the frequencies that are undesirable. That ends up sounding far more natural than adding EQ. In mixes that have been done by a pro engineer, nearly all your problems will come from below 1 Khz...

Whatever you choose, I'm sure it'll work out fine.

To be fair, I think that's a bit of a stretch. I know a lot of musicians and sound engineers I've worked with over the years, and I can't think of any who use a MAC. Some of them don't even use a MAC or a PC. I don't know anything about photography, but the vast majority of audio studios I've been in, which is a shitload, use PC's. Could just be because most people who run studios are poor, I don't know... The only people who ever paid me well were corporate gigs, and that was really soul destroying stuff that I tried to avoid, recording cheesy ditties for truck roll-outs and suchlike, so buying a MAC would have been an extravagance I couldn't afford even if I didn't think they were overpriced and over-hyped. I served a year of my time on a Pro Tools rig on a MAC G5, and it was a highly unpleasant experience. The amount of hours lost due to the thing crashing would have been risible if it wasn't so serious. I don't know if there was some kind of conflict between the MAC and D-A interface or what, I never got to examine the problem, but the MTBF on that set up was best measured in minutes. I don't remember ever doing any recording work where the MAC didn't buy the farm at least once. If you buy your PC to order purchasing only high quality components, you'll get twice as much audio processing done per dollar you spend, and then some.