EP Perfected
Thursday, October 6, 2011 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:
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.

Timothy Sadler | Comments Off | 















