Producer/percussionist Randy Crafton is
building Kaleidoscope Sound, a 2,000 square-foot commercial
facility located near midtown Manhattan. Randy says;
After nearly completing Richie Haven's last
production, we wanted to do final mix tweaks in a larger room.
Calling around to find a facility where we could bring the
near-final mixes as Digital Performer files was educational
at best. The conversations generally went something like this:
"I am interested in bringing my Digital Performer files
into your room to listen in a different environment and make
final-mix adjustments." Long pause, followed by a few
hmmms and errrs, as they quickly realized that they could
also charge me to transfer our tracks into their Pro Tools
system, and it would work fine (for them). I then had to remind
them that |
Ray Dillard and I had mixed
to the point where we just needed a day of final tweaks in
a new environment. I was aware that with their plan A, I would
lose all of our mixing automation, be forced to commit to
all of our edits and comps through merging sound bites and
lose all of our plug-ins-i.e., remix the recording.
Their plan B was, "Why not take it to
a transfer house and just dump it onto ADAT or Tascam and
bring that? I would have to transfer everything back to a
10 year-old digital system in order to work in a "state-of-the-art"
studio!
We did eventually find a studio (World Beat
in Manhattan) willing to let us bring our entire DP rig into
their room and "tweak away." We are determined to
learn from our negative experience when we build our commercial
studio. We believe a commercial facility that provides flexibility
of formats (combined with a pro monitoring environment and
an arsenal of vintage gear) will be competitive in the New
York City market.
|
Studio A will be based around a Pro Tools/HD3
system and a custom API analog console. A sidecar computer
will always be ready to run DP, Logic, Cubase, Nuendo or Reason
with a PC to run GigaStudio, Acid and VST Instruments.
In our experience, DP is a very stable platform
until you run it under DAE or until you introduce a ReWire
scenario with a VST wrapper.
If a client comes in with any of these formats
and plugs in a drive, he or she will have access to a room
large enough to track a small orchestra and still be able
to go home with his or her files-intact and without paying
to transfer them. |
