Revisiting my first-ever Home Production (from 2014)

[GregB]

Pro Tools INTRO was released just a few weeks ago. It's FREE on both Mac/Windows.  It hopefully provides me and my closest musical collaborator the way to finally seamlessly exchange recording sessions.  Pro Tools INTRO gives 8 Audio, 8 Instrument and 8 MIDI tracks, the XPAND instrument library, 35 stock plugins (including EQ, Compression, Verb and Delay) and allows all my current and future AAX plugins.  This setup would have been sufficient to complete ALL my 50+ past releases.

 

I met Martin, a local musician, in 2013 and we subsequently enjoyed coffee, chatting about music and playing acoustic guitars in my kitchen.  One day in late 2014, the musical taps mysteriously turned themselves on and we soon had an album's worth of material. Neither of us wished to spend money in a commercial studio on a 'hobby' (as both of us are married) or submit to the control of others.  So I dusted off Pro Tools + MBox 2 which had been lurking unused on my Windows laptop for six years and committed to the learning curve.  Fortunately YouTube tutorials were then kicking into gear.  The 1500pp Manual was also very useful.

 

The very first track we recorded at my place was "Scent of Summer", Martin's first ever song. And it was this song's Session Folder that I chose for testing interoperability between our computers.  But first, I had to ensure it would still open and WORK on my laptop.
YES IT DID ... seven years after creation!   
One minor/free plugin was missing, as well as Izotope 5 (as I'm now up to v.9). 

 

To my amazement, it sounded great despite my being, in 2014, a complete klutz at recording, mixing, mastering.  There was no gain staging and both EQ and compression were 'achieved' by blindly fiddling with knobs ... I really didn't have a clue what I was doing!!

 

Here are the session details plus the release/music video that Martin did (under duress).

 

The elements were:

• Drums (audio clips found on the net)
• my MIDI Bass (XPand library)
• Martin's 6-string acoustic DI
• Martin's 6-string acoustic DI - lead
• Martin's lead vocal
• Martin's lead vocal doubled
• Martins vocal - processed callback
• my harmony 1
• my harmony 2
• my 12-string DI
• my MIDI Piano (XPand library)

 

 

Has anyone else ever gone back to their first-ever session and retrieved full functional control of all plugins/automation etc.?
Can anyone beat a gap of SEVEN years?

 

Greg

 

[john]

I can’t say for certain, somewhere between 8 and 11 years. I had to resurrect a PC running Windows 98 with two awesome sound cards from Creamware (Pulsar 2 was one of them can’t remember the other). I remember I had to replace the DOS CMOS battery on the motherboard to get the system to boot! Lol The sound cards used reprogrammable DSP hardware in the form of FPGA Sharc processors. 20+ year old hardware now but they could still give a lot of modern sound cards a run for their money. At the time they were worth about $2400 just for the two sound cards! In addition to the software VST in Cakewalk there were a host of FPGA modelled hardware modules. It was a great system.