EP Perfected

Apparently, Im terrible at this. Blogging that is. Well, keeping up to date is the problem. But I’m not deterred!  

Last week I wound up my contributions to the Deanna Loveland “Inner Perfection” EP project in Nashville. What a summer vacation! Remarkably talented people all around. That’s partly because you have to watch where you’re going in Music City or you’ll bump into a really talented musician, or two. 

I was at a monthly songwriters round a couple of weeks ago, when the host, a hit songwriter himself, having invited my friend Rand Bishop out of the audience for a couple of tune’s, asked the crowd, sarcastically, if anybody else wanted to come up and sing his/her number one hit. The audience roared with laughter. The likelihood of other hit songwriters being in the crowd was very high. You gotta be careful what you wish for in Nashville.

I wish I had more photos, but here are a few:

Deanna at the 88's

Rand and Deanna 

Yours truly at the controls

Mark Prentice, laying down some bass parts

the infamous Nashville “numbers chart” for The One. If you understand this shit, you are a real Nashville player.

Deanna in our makeshift vocal booth

Deanna tuning the harp

Deanna and Chris Rodriguez laying down guitar parts

For those who are interested we did most of are work at Rand’s home studio using a late model Quad-Core i7 iMac. The one twist I introduced was the 256MB SSD drive as the System/Protools disk; audio was recorded and streamed from a traditional 1TB, 7200RMP, Internal HD. Mixing one of our “larger” productions required allocating the SSD for both Protools and the audio files. I was still compelled to bounce/print my mixes to the HD, but the SSD provided the extra speed needed to stream and process a large number of audio tracks, all with RTAS plug-ins.

We did vocals, lead and bg’s, guitars, percussion, penny whistle, concertina, harp, piano and even cello, all at Rand’s. Additional recording venues included Hilltops Studios where we did a string session and Charlie Morgan’s home studio where we added Charlie’s drum tracks and Mark’s bass parts. We mixed all seven tracks at Rand’s, but will master elsewhere.

Speaking of mixing, the Avid Artist Series Mix controllers, really brought the Digital Audio Workstation up to par with our former analog mixing environments. Sorry, I need my hands on real faders to get the feel just right. But using control-surface real faders to adjust tracks a few bars at a time, thanks to Protools mix automation, is a real time saver. In fact, it’s become so easy to tweak a mix, that everyone involve can have what they want.

I want to add a mention for the Mackie Big Knob monitor control. Having finger tip control of three sets of monitors, plus three sets of source inputs, also helps to bring the DAW/project studio environment up to par.

Next Up Nashville

PTG (Protools-To-Go) heads to Music City later this month to record the multi-talented Deanna Loveland.

Don't let the harp fool you. This new artist plays the harp and piano at the same time while belting out her own musical compositions. This debut EP will be produced by our long-time friend and musical genius, Rand Bishop. Rand has a long Nashville resume as a successful songwriter and producer. In 2002 he co-wrote the huge Toby Keith hit, My List, and with Deanna has co-penned several of the tracks we'll be doing for this EP.

 

As for Deanna's resume, here's some licks from her blog...

"Deanna Loveland is a harpist, pianist, singer/songwriter and entrepreneur. Originally from the eastern shore of Maryland, Deanna studied piano at the age of 5 and began learning the harp when she was 11. While she didn’t pursue a music degree, she took courses at the International Academy of Music in Indiana in 2005 and kept a busy schedule of 130 performances each year.

Her performance resume includes a wide range of venues from the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville and private events for Jerry Bruckheimer at his estate in Kentucky, to performing on mission trips in Mexico at the Premier Iglesia Bautista.

In 2008 Deanna expanded her profile by signing with a talent agency as an actress/model. She has appeared in music videos and commercials for artists including Ruben Studdard, Brooks & Dunn, Keith Urban, and most recently appeared in the film, “Country Strong” starring Gwyneth Paltrow & Tim McGraw.

Deanna is currently in the process of launching a signature collection for her music fans while also finishing a new recording project. She resides on a beautiful farm in Fairview, TN where she keeps her home office and enjoys the quiet inspiration of the farm."

The Shaw Brothers at the MAC

Andy and Chris Shaw started playing acoustic gigs together back in 2004. The brothers played Andy's original tunes, and that quickly evolved into the Andy Shaw Band. With the success of the band, Andy and Chris have gone back to their roots, in a sense, to perform and write new acoustic material. These songs are a mix of all of the styles they enjoy, but mainly folk and acoustic in nature. The project has been very well received playing venues all around Columbus, Ohio.

We had the great fortune to record their concert at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington OH on May 19th. We used our ProTools-to-Go rig for the first time in a live concert setting. The configuration was basic; 6 pre-fader line-outs off the house Allen & Heath mixer into our Focusrite OcktoPre MkII Dyn and our stereo Rode NT4 for hall ambience, into our Focusrite SaffirePro 40. Rode NT4

As an experiment, we video-recorded the performance on a Sanyo Xacti camcorder. Though this video was shot wild, (no timecode), we were able to lay it back to the ProTools recording, nudge it into frame-accurate sync and get a reasonable reference video to play with our re-mixes. We'd like to note the cooperation of Brad Grunwell and Andy Herron of the MAC. Thanks, guys.

Miss Me?

Well I've been away from the music biz for a while. There was that film-sound career and then all those computers and software; oh and did forget to mention, I actually did help invent the Internet. The "tubes" really. Anybody remember capecod.net!

All water under the proverbial bridge. I'm back in the saddle and  sporting a nice new ProTools mobile rig. PT v9, in fact. Wow what an upgrade. It's like a whole new product.

Oh and the new/old controllers from Avid (formerly Euphonix). They seem to be really getting the hang of this virtual studio thing. For gearheads this stuff is a wetdream.

I'll have lots of specifics about my rig and what I'm up to with it, in future posts. Stay tuned.

Update on Tuesday, June 7, 2011 by Timothy Sadler

Hey the mobile rig specs are finally on a page with photos....