Winter can be really glum on the East Coast. On the bright
side, it can often be a great time to hunker down in the studio and write some
music. I had an interesting experience doing just this over the holiday break and
I wanted to share. Before I could get much accomplished, both my Mac Pro and my
writing/playing were in need of some servicing. With all the exciting activity
here at Avid, I hadn’t been keeping my software updates or my creative chops up
to speed. Snow Leopard needed updating, as did a number of my Pro Tools plug-ins.
Plus, my iTunes library had completely outgrown my internal hard drive, so I
transferred it temporarily to my “audio” drive.
Anyway, I quickly got my rig up and running and I was really
excited about spending some quality time writing with my new Pro Tools|HD
Native rig—without having to run work-related tests on latency, maximum plug-in
counts, or just tweaking a mix for demo purposes. However, I knew the next part
was going to be more challenging—getting the creative juices flowing.You never know what to expect when you’re sitting down trying
to be creative, but after all of the tests I’d run, I was confident that at
least the system would work well. And the gear did what it was supposed to
do—it got out of the way and let me quickly capture some ideas and lay down
some tracks. I played around with a ton of ideas, comp’ing, layering guitars
and vocals, and experimenting with plug-ins. At one point I even forgot I was using HD Native and not my Pro Tools|HD Accel rig that was previously installed in my computer—it was that powerful and the latency totally unnoticeable, even when tracking vocals. It only occurred to me when I checked the system usage window,
expecting to see a list of accelerated DSPs. Instead, I saw the minimal
resources my 8-core machine was using to process a sick amount of EQs,
compressors, reverbs, delays and VIs. The amount of native processing I was
getting out of a quad core running at a 32-sample buffer was just astonishing! And the quality of the I/O—well, you
just need to hear that for yourself because they sound amazing. However, I wasn’t really feeling very inspired with the
music. And even though I know that this kind of “writer’s block” happens to way
better, more dedicated writers than myself, it was still frustrating.
Later in the holiday week, I took my wife and kids to visit
my folks in Jersey. I had some work to do, so I packed my laptop and figured we
could probably entertain the kids and ourselves if we had some music and iTunes
TV episodes with us. Then I remembered that my iTunes library was no longer on
my drive. Complications. I’d need to pack my external drive. And then I started
feeling rebellious—why should I be working so hard over break anyway? That’s
it, I decided, I’m bringing my guitar too. After everyone went to sleep that night at my family’s house,
I chipped away at some work-related things. Then my mind started wandering to
thoughts like, “Even though NJ might have been more agrarian in the 1800s, is
the ‘Garden State’ the best moniker they could think of?” And, “Where would I
be now if I decided not to pursue music and audio production?” Then I remembered my acoustic guitar was downstairs. I snuck
down past the other bedrooms and settled on the couch with my old Guild G-37.
Immediately, I was thankful to have brought it—something about sneaking around
the house with a guitar after everyone is sleeping is really inspiring. Everything
was so quiet and dark that the guitar sounded bigger than normal. I came back to
some ideas I’d been playing with in the studio and suddenly, I got it. It was a
twist on the approach for the track, more of a different feel than anything
else, but it brought the “song” somewhere else completely, and I was loving it!
I needed to get it down fast, so I wouldn’t forget it—you know, like I do with all
of my greatest ideas. Typically in this situation, I’d grab some paper and jot
down the chord progression and sometimes try to scratch out the notation for
the melody. Just as I was walking into the kitchen to grab a pen and paper, it
hit me—no, not an epiphany of Jersey’s misnomer as the “Garden State”—but that
the FireWire drive I had packed for the trip that included my iTunes library
also had the Pro Tools session I’d been working on in the studio. I fired up the
same session started on my HD Native system on my laptop and continued where I
left off—without any hardware.Friggin’
awesome!
Now, most of you are probably thinking, welcome to 2011, we’ve all been able to do that for years using apps
like Logic, Cubase, and Live. While it’s true that Pro Tools did not give
you that flexibility until recently, it was the only solution that scaled up to
meet the requirements of our most demanding customers, or even mine at times, in
terms of power and performance. Adding
the flexibility to scale downward to a bare-bones software-only setup opened up new ways
of working whenever—and wherever—inspiration striked. You could use a tricked out Pro Tools|HD DSP-accelerated
system or Pro Tools|HD Native to get the greatest performance and sound quality
while in the studio. And get the complete freedom and flexibility to capture ideas anywhere—without any hardware—while maintaining
session compatibility throughout. We no longer have to choose between complete
capability and complete flexibility in order to keep session files on the same
platform, but get ultimate scalability for the requirements at hand. And it‘s
not as if I didn’t know this—but to experience it was something completely
different. It made me proud to be an employee—and really happy to be a
customer.
What else could you ask for? Well… maybe larger internal
laptop drives, of course.
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