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The
Making Of An Album
Page 13
- Conclusion -
by Michael Tyler
Computer Music Products
Today's audio and MIDI products puts it within every musician's grasp to produce high quality musical projects themselves. For us, and many other small musical groups, it would have been impossible to afford to hire a full compliment of orchestral musicians, bear the cost of studio time and hire a professional studio engineer to produce a project such as the one we just completed. Our "orchestra" occupies less than a cubic foot of space (the two sound modules) and provides us with a selection of 880 instrument sounds to choose from. The majority of our recording and audio processing "equipment" resides in a single desktop computer system, most of which is represented as software alone. This literally translates into a cost saving of many thousands of dollars if compared to purchasing actual recording studio hardware with equivalent capabilities. My, how times have changed!
While recording and mastering in-house won't necessarily guarantee the same results you might get if you hired a professional facility, you can certainly expect to be able to come reasonably close. A computer-based personal studio puts a lot of power and potential into the hands of the user. The trick is learning how to actually take advantage of it. Experience will prevail, meaning with each new project, you sharpen your skills and learn the techniques that make each project better than the one before it.
Before I wrap this up, a few things come to mind that I think are worth mentioning.
During this project, the Cakewalk company updated the Cakewalk Pro Audio software to version 7 (we were using version 6). Then a few weeks later, they updated again to version 8. I ordered both versions as they became available, but chose to stick with the version I was using until the end of the project. Although I noticed a number of nice enhancements I could have possibly used on this project, I didn't want any downtime due to learning the new versions. We were so close to the end of the project that it really didn't matter anyway.
In the midst of the project a new multimedia driver became available for my AudioWerk 8 card. I learned from an E-Magic representative that there was a known issue regarding monitoring while recording, and this had been dealt with in the new driver. Had the driver become available soon enough, I undoubtedly would have used the AudioWerk for all audio recording as originally planned. I obtained the new driver after it was out of the Beta testing stage, long after the audio had already been recorded.
Here's a bit of advice. It doesn't take long for fatigue to set in if you're using headphones as your primary means of monitoring while editing, processing and mixing a project (like I did)! We plan to purchase a good pair of amplified studio monitor speakers for future projects, and you probably should too. (I'll still have to use headphones while recording vocals however, since I have no immediate plans to construct an isolation booth.)
On a project that involves a lot of repeated hard disk access (i.e., digital audio recording and editing), the disk becomes progressively fragmented and can cause glitches in your song playback. I frequently had to use my disk defragment utility in order to keep things running smoothly. This is important maintenance to ensure smooth data transfer during recording and playback of digital audio. There were some days that I defragmented the disk two and even three times when I was performing a lot of digital audio editing and processing. Be prepared for a bit of "disk housekeeping" when working with digital audio recordings.
I hope you enjoyed the article and found some useful material. May I wish you the very best on YOUR album project!
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