Time is Money -- Working with Composers to Prepare For More Efficient Tracking Dates

Little-known features in Digital Performer can help speed up the work flow

By Les Brockmann

Recently I got called to the beautiful seaside home of a film composer, for a day of recording on his score to an independent film. The composer was a new client for me, and the film was the first feature from a talented young director, very low-budget. As in every film score project, the goal was to make as much good music as possible for as little money as possible. Unfortunately, due primarily to time constraints, things weren't as well prepared as they should have been, and so the budget suffered as a result. I always take very seriously the time and budget pressure of getting things going as quickly as possible, and keeping a session running smoothly, but when it doesn't, the best I can do is to try to find out how to make sure that doesn't happen again to me, my clients, or anyone else.

The composer had a good 40 or so cues prepared as separate files in Digital Performer 4.61, with pre-recorded tracks from various sampler instrument sources, including Ivory piano, some other soft-synth samples, and several external Gigastudios. The goal was to spend a day of recording overdub tracks with a very talented and highly coveted (expensive) studio guitarist. (I'm skipping names because it's not my intention to cast a bad light on anyone; we all did the best we could under the circumstances, and throughout I was treated with extremely cordial professionalism and generosity.) Why would I tell about a session that didn't go as perfectly as possible? Because there is a lot that can be learned from this example.

Setup

The guitar recording was scheduled for all day Friday, and so first I was asked to come over on Thursday afternoon to set up. There was quite a lot to do, including setting up microphones, stands, and cables, high-quality microphone preamps and converters were brought in, and a headphone cue system had to be created and installed. The composer had recently gotten rid of his mixing board, as many have, and so all that was left to interface with was several MOTU 2408s. So I got that all set up and functioning correctly.

The composer was under a great deal of time pressure, as he said he still had to prepare printed music parts for the guitarist. I knew one thing that I would have to do was establish new blank audio tracks in each sequence file, and so I took the time to do that in one of the cues to start with, and copied those tracks with their input and output assignments, levels, and aux send reverb settings, to a DP "Clippings Window" (more about that to come). The setup at this point had taken me about three hours, and that was all the time the composer had to spare, so we left the rest of it for Friday morning's tracking session.

Recording Day

Ultimately all the music got recorded, with no performance compromises, and the composer and director were very pleased. But it took longer than expected, and the primary culprit was that it took so long to open and prepare each individual file in Digital Performer.

Even though the sample instrument tracks had been rendered or copied to audio tracks, still with every file the soft-synth instruments were instantiated and so it took precious minutes to wait for those sound banks to slowly load. In addition, of course, before we could record any guitar parts, new blank audio tracks had to be added to each sequence. I was able to add in several previously prepared blank audio tracks from the Clippings Window, but the computer took quite a few bullet-sweating moments to process those as well. The composer told me afterwards, that with an average time wasted of three to five minutes per cue, the total added up to over two hours! In hindsight it would have been nice if we could have found time to add those tracks to each file before our musician showed up.

Let's take a look at a feature in Digital Performer that helped me out that day, and another important one that could have.

The Clippings Window

Consider what happens when you need to add a number of new tracks to a sequence in Digital Performer (or any similar software such as Pro Tools, Logic, etc.). Each track (audio or MIDI) must have its input source and output routing set through the pop-up menus, and you may wish to set other mixer settings as well. Now suppose, as often happens, this same group of new tracks needs to be added to a number of additional files, such as all the cues in a score or songs in an album. If this all had to be done individually, it would be an enormous time sink.

The Clippings Window lets you make a copy of any track or group of tracks, and anything they may contain, save that copy permanently in DP, and then insert it into the Tracks Window of any sequence. You'll need to start by creating a new empty Clippings Window. In the "Project" menu, select "Clippings" and then on the side sub-menu, choose "New Digital Performer Clipping Window". (I like this version because the window will then appear in every Performer file.) Give the window a name, such as "Blank Tracks", by option-clicking on its title bar.

Now go to the Tracks Window and create and label a group of tracks to work with. Set the input and output assignments, and any settings in the Mixer you may want, such as levels, panning, aux sends and assignments, and plugins. On the Tracks window select and highlight these tracks, including a region of time (any length will do as long as the tracks are completely empty). Then in the "Edit" menu select "Copy to Clipping Window" and at the side, "Copy to Blank Tracks" (Fig. 1a). When the clipping appears in the Clippings window, option-click on it and give it a name such as "Blank Guitar Tracks" (Fig. 1b).




Fig. 1 a & b

To use this in a different sequence, find your Clippings Window (select it under the "Windows" menu if it's not already showing on the desktop). Select the clipping and simply drag it over and drop it into the left half of the Tracks window. All of those tracks should appear, with their settings intact. The track names will have the word "copy" appended; option-click and delete that if you want.

Notice this is a quicker way to add new tracks to a sequence, but it doesn't happen instantly. On a sequence with a lot of tracks and "bundles" (available input/output and bus assignments) it can take up to a minute or more for the computer to process a group of new tracks added from a Clipping. So, it's still a good idea to do it before the musicians arrive!

The V-Rack in the Mixer Window

In DP, let's take a look for moment at the Chunks Window. Many composers work with just one sequence (cue or song) per file, but it's possible to have many. Instead of the whole file being "1m1", for example, you could make the file be "Reel One", and then have chunks "1m1", "1m2", "1m3", etc. What's the advantage of this? It can make it much quicker to go from one cue to another, they can all share the same video Movie, and they can all access the same group of soft synthesizers and samplers using a V-Rack.

Lots of people these days are using software plug-in synths and samplers such as Ivory, Stylus RMX, EWQL Orchestra, etc. These products give access to wonderful sounding sample libraries, but they can take a long time to load when you open a different file. You can always go for a cup of coffee, but that's hard to do when someone is standing there waiting, such as a musician, or your client!

The V-Rack can help with that. It works best if you establish it at the very beginning of your composing process, before you have recorded a note. What we're going to do is instantiate all the soft synth instruments just once, and share them across many or all of the cues, which will be in separate Chunks within the same file (Fig. 2).


Fig. 2

The old "normal" way of working would be to instantiate each new soft synth in the Tracks window by selecting under the "Project" menu, "Add new track > Instrument track > Ivory" (or whatever). But in this case, let's not add those instruments here in the Tracks window. Instead show the Mixer window, and on the top bar of that window, click on the small "V" symbol in a circle.

Now you are looking at the V-Rack section of the Mixer. Now, go to the "Project" menu and add one or more soft synth instruments (Fig. 3).


Fig. 3

What's the advantage of this? Now, within any of the sequences (cues) within that file, if you add a MIDI track you can access those plugin synths. This works especially well if the synth is playing a patch that can be used in common among several cues, such as a string pad. It's as if you had a rack of synths sitting there, plugged in and always live. The V-Rack is also a good place to put Aux tracks with mixing effects you may want in common for all the cues, such as plugin reverbs and delays. Click on the "V" symbol again to hide the V-Rack and reveal the other tracks in the Mixer, for that particular selected sequence.

Advantages and disadvantages: It's much easier to go from cue to cue by selecting in the "Chunks" window (or, better, the pop-up in the upper left corner of the Tracks window), and you don't have to wait for samples to load. The only reason to ever instantiate a soft synth in the Tracks window would be if it were for a unique sound that will never be used in any of the other cues. However, if you have a great number of cues as chunks within the same file, the computer may start behaving as if it's dealing with a very huge file, with slow saves, etc. A comfortable compromise might be to have a new file for each separate reel or section, with a few cues in each one. Then, the more you can organize your recording session to work with several cues in a row from each group, the less you will have to wait for sequences and sample libraries to load.

And so...

The way we compose and record has come a long way from the days when the engineer would thread and wind a reel of multitrack tape, and we would wait for each new piece of music to be located. Computers have given us a lot more power and convenience, but it seems the pace at which we need to work has speeded up, and it's annoying to have to wait. Learning new tricks and increasing your expertise with your tools (or having an expert at your side to take care of those details) can help relieve the stress and make things go more quickly and smoothly.


This is not intended as an advertisement for any product. All products mentioned are trademarks of their various manufacturers. ©2006 by Les Brockmann

A New Generation Mixing Console And Recorder

An evaluation and production example with the Yamaha DM-2000 mixer and Tascam MX-2424


By Les Brockmann

Note: This article originally was published in the Society of Composers and Lyricists magazine "The Score", under the title "Two New Studio Workhorses". The Tascam MX-2424 recorder is now discontinued, and has been replaced with the X-48, which has similar features. The Yamaha DM-2000 is still available and, along with its smaller siblings the DM1000V2, 02R96V2, and 01V96V2, is still a very good choice for composers' personal studios or commercial facilities.

Have you ever gone to a live music show, and perhaps heard an instrumental part and couldn't figure out who in the band was playing it? Or maybe wondered why the lead singer seemed to be able to execute fancy dance steps and still sing smoothly without panting and puffing?

With the possible exception of Philharmonic concerts, the use of synchronized recordings to accompany or enhance live performers has gotten to be an accepted and important part of shows in many types of venues, including touring pop acts, musical theater, and tourist venues such as theme parks, cruise ships, and Las Vegas shows. In particular the tourism industry, in fervent competition for your leisure dollar, spends ever-increasing amounts of money to present extravagant and increasingly sophisticated productions.

The technical tools for creating music tracks for live venues have a lot in common with those we use for film and television scoring, particularly ever-increasing numbers of recorded tracks and mixing console channels. Recently I've encountered a couple of excellent new pieces of equipment that have been a real help in both my work with film music and music for live shows: the Yamaha DM-2000 mixing console and the Tascam MX-2424 hard-drive multitrack digital recorder.

For several years I've have the pleasure of working with Nelson Kole. Nelson is a terrific producer, composer, arranger, and pianist. He has worked or played for entertainers such as Martin Short, Billy Crystal, Ben Vereen, Frank Sinatra, and a host of others; he's currently the composer for Martin Short's "Prime Time Glick" series on Comedy Central. And he is one of the most in-demand specialists in the production of pre-recorded musical shows for live venues, for clients such as Princess Cruises. Recently an upgrade to his personal studio gave him and I the opportunity to select and evaluate a new mixer and recording machine and use them to expand our production techniques.

Our production of pre-recorded show music is quite like recording an album: We record everything, rhythm, sweetening, lead and group vocals, the works. We provide a mix on multiple separate tracks, so in the show they can hear or mute whichever parts they need. Usually when the show is staged there are lead performers who sing live, cast dancers who lip-sync group vocals, and sometimes a pit band or not. When I first started working on these some years ago, we would provide finished mixes on eight tracks of a Tascam DA-88. Later we went to 16 tracks, two machines running together. Now within the last year or so the clients have requested mixes separated out to 24 tracks! The DA-88s began to get tired and tedious; something better was needed.

An important tool for Nelson is Digital Performer, used for everything from building tempo and click maps and demos to many tracks of MIDI and audio production. Increasingly the show choreographers are demanding song productions that are copies of pop records, so we need lots of plug-ins and other tools to replicate this kind of sound.

Our typical process is to record band and singers in a commercial studio and then go to the personal studio for additional MIDI work, overdubs and mixing. I have long been a fan of operating recording machines using MIDI machine control, and a stack of DA-88s controlled by Digital Performer running on a laptop Macintosh was the system of choice for a while. Why not record directly into DP? In composers' studios I've done so without hesitation for several years, but haven't been able to come up with a really good transportable system.

Considering a new machine to record with, we discussed the choices. We knew we would like to have at least 24 channels of inputs and outputs. The first possibility: the purchase of a big ProTools system, mounted in a portable rack. However, we agreed that ProTools falls far short of Digital Performer in the important area of MIDI, and we are comfortable with Digital Performer for audio production. We thought about a system with DP and several MOTU audio interfaces. But I was uncomfortable with the audio latency when recording on a large number of tracks at one time, as we often need to. DP with ProTools hardware is possible but not entirely compatible. And it would have all ended up in a rack the size of a refrigerator, requiring cartage delivery every time.

As it turned out, Princess Cruises recently chose the Tascam MX-2424 for their audio systems in new on-board theaters. So we evaluated this machine and found it to be suitable for our needs as well. The MX-2424 has 24 inputs and outputs and can record in 24-bit digital audio on removable SCSI hard drives. I have found the machine to be very easy to work with, and the sound of the analog/digital converters, a generation newer than the venerable DA-88, is very big, clean, and punchy, with no latency.

The MX-2424 can operate stand-alone (and never crashes!), or it can be synced and controlled with an external computer via MIDI machine control. It can also communicate with an external Mac or PC via Ethernet; on the computer one can run a provided software called "MX-View" which gives much easier access to file management, many levels of Undo, and provides a graphic waveform display for every track, allowing audio track editing and volume automation. Although there are only 24 ins and outs, every channel can have multiple virtual tracks, organized as alternate "takes". The only limitation to this is that each channel can only monitor one take at time; there is no internal sub-mixing.

I took some time to learn and evaluate the MX-View application. It's designed to emulate a simplified version of a ProTools-like interface, although it doesn't have the sophistication that we are accustomed to in Digital Performer, ProTools, and others. One can do edge edits and time drags of audio wave forms, but MX-View lacks effective track grouping and snap-to-grid functions that would allow one to get very far into this kind of editing. (It's too easy to accidentally drag something out of sync it and have no way to get it back except for the Undo command, so you have to be careful.)

Still, as long as you're not expecting this to be a full-featured sophisticated workstation, it has a lot to offer for the price of just over $4,000. Our typical workflow is this: We take the MX-2424 to a commercial studio for live tracking of rhythm, horns, and vocals. I control it via MIDI machine control from a PowerBook running DP; MX-View can also run in the background on the same Mac and continuously show waveforms, and be available for simple editing and file management when needed. After tracking, in the personal studio I will transfer the tracks digitally into DP for any further editing, plug-ins, and mixing. (Since the machine saves SD-II time-stamped audio files in a Mac-compatible format, one can import tracks from the drive into DP or ProTools via the Finder; however after doing that once I found that it was more efficient to just route the machine's digital outputs through the mixer into the 2408 and copy the tracks into DP in real time.) Then, using a different drive cartridge in the MX-2424, I prepare the final mixes and record them back into the machine for delivery to the client.

Speaking of mixing, we had clearly outgrown the little 32x8 analog Mackie, so I set out to evaluate mixers. I've worked with a number of the new generation of digital mixers, and they offer a lot of nice features, particularly snapshot recall of settings. But most of them are too small for the needs of working composers. I had my eye on the Yamaha DM-2000 ever since the first product rumors. It's definitely larger than most, offering 96 inputs arranged in four banks of 24 faders. I was concerned about it still being an 8-bus board. Our goal was to be able to lay down mixes of as many as 24 tracks/stems at a time — could we do it?

It turned out that we could, and here's the secret: the DM-2000 has incredibly flexible routing of both inputs and outputs. First of all, any of the 96 + inputs and outputs (more when you count additional ins and outs from digital and analog two-track monitoring connections and eight analog "omni" outputs) can be routed just about anywhere. Every fader channel can be output to stereo, one of the eight buses, or "direct" which can be sent to any output on the board. In addition, besides the eight "official" submixing buses, I can derive additional stereo buses by reconfiguring any of the 12 aux sends (which can, again, then be routed anywhere). Using a combination of these various types of routing, plus the occasional sub-mix of similar tracks in Digital Performer, I haven't yet encountered a mix where I couldn't lay down all 24 tracks at once!

The DM-2000 has turned out to be great-sounding and powerful. It always runs in 24-bit mode; it can optionally be set to 96KHz sample rate but we haven't tried that due to the higher sample rate being incompatible with Gigastudios and other connected devices. But even at the standard 44.1, it sounds big and clean. It includes eight good-sounding multi-effects (reverb, etc.) processors, and flexible compression and gating on every channel. The moving-fader automation works very smoothly and professionally. And it can handle 5.1 surround monitoring, as well as stereo.

Our goal in creating mixes for the show venue is for their live-sound mixer to raise all 24 faders with a ruler and hear the mix exactly as we intended it, and then be able to change balances or routing as needed. So, as I set up a mix, I route all the sources to the various tracks of the MX-2424, with it monitoring "input". When laying down the mixes, everything synchronizes with MIDI or linear time code.

The bottom line: the clients have noticed and commented on a nice improvement in the quality of our finished productions. These two pieces of gear have substantially enhanced our workflow and sound.


This is not intended as an advertisement for any product. All products mentioned are trademarks of their various manufacturers. ©2003 by Les Brockmann