Category : Blog Post

Several audio friends I know (Jeffrey Fischer & Dave Cebrowski) put me on to a different way of monitoring. The technique stresses the importance of allowing for headroom when working in an all digital environment.

To accomplish this, do NOT attempt to have your music “in the red” all of the time. Instead, calibrate your monitors so that -20 dB = 0 VU = 83 dB SPL per monitor. Then, I use the K-14 or K-20 monitoring system with my Precision Limiter from Universal Audio.

The wonderful part about this is that you can actually mix WITHOUT looking at the meter all the time! 83 dB in this system sounds plenty loud, so you know when things are “too loud”, and you just adjust. At the same time, peaks can be allowed because you have between 14 and 20 dB of headroom! (depending on which system you use). To read more about the K-system, designed by legendary mastering engineer Bob Katz, you can read this article on his website.

Enjoy and happy mixing!

I have made a recent addition to my “samples” page with a custom-created edit of the Starship Farragut Movie I worked on recently. The demo has about 6 minutes of highlights, musically speaking, from the film that I think demonstrate some different styles pretty well. Please take a look and drop me a line with any comments.
However, I’m not completely thrilled by the format I used to embed it. Quicktime compression looks fantastic and I think does a nice job of compressing to a small size and still looking (and more importantly for me) and sounding good. However, it is far more awkward for the end user than the flash-style format popularized by youtube and google video.  Hence, I decided to use Google Video to host it, though it most certainly lowers the audio quality.
Enjoy!

I recently noticed that Bias has upgraded their industry-standard two-track editor, Peak Pro, to version 6! Right now you can pre-order an upgrade for $149 if you have version 5. I checked out the feature list and have selected a few highlights for you below that I see as especially promising:

• Perpetual Loop DSP: ensures perfect “beat-free” sustained loops on monophonic sources. Ideal for creating instrument sample libraries. (more…)

On a recent project (see my last post) I ran into a situation where Logic Pro was literally stumbling and halting quite frequently giving me the standard (and far from helpful) “Logic is too slow error”.

However, I noticed that if I stopped and started it from the same spot many, many times it eventually played through just fine. How weird!

After much testing, I figured out what I believe the cause of this. This recent project had the following attributes to it:

1. I was running on my Power Mac G5/2×1.8 Ghz with 2 GB RAM
2. Most recent version of Logic Pro and Mac OS X 10.4.x
3. The project had some very long “songs” which were film scores, ranging anywhere from 5-15+ minutes per “song”. (I have multiple “songs” that then made up the entire project
4. The cues were all written in a classic “star trek” style, utilizing full orchestral sounds, though with sparse orchestration. Hence, I might have 40-60 exs24 instruments loaded up (many of them keyswitched samples from the likes of libraries like Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl) and Project SAM True Strike, etc.) so there was a significant amount of samples at my disposal.
5. exs24 streams samples from disk, but also requires a certain amount of RAM per exs24 instrument (around 8-14 MB, depending on settings and such)
6. I was using very limited “plug-ins” besides a reverb or two which was being powered off of a UAD-1 card (almost zero CPU hit) and was streaming the samples from a separted SATA RAID HDD, so bandwidth on that end should not be a problem

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A few weeks ago I got a very interesting offer. The fan-film project “Starship Farragut” was in desperate need of a composer for their pilot episode called “The Capitancy”. The film crew and cast was full of passionate individuals hoping to achieve the best film possible. They had a deadline already set in stone by the premiere at a Science Fiction festival in Baltimore, but unfortunately, the composer they had worked with in the past had to drop out at the last minute.

This left them with a 45 minute or so film with no score to speak of and a little more than 2 weeks to complete it!

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