London Sessions - some technical musings

I had many backups of the Falmouth sessions. I brought 2 versions with me, Vince had 2 versions and I had a DVD backup and spare hard drive sent over by UPS. The night before the first Vocal Session I had transferred the Audio and songs from Falmouth (on an Avastor drive) onto one of the Internal Drives of my dual 2.7 G5.

We have used a large number of Reaktor synths, and I have always had AutoSave on, so the Ensembles have saved in the relevant song folder. Nevertheless because I have now got the Project folders on a different drive, when I open each song none of the Reaktors play, until I manually load in an ensemble. Once I do that all other relevant ensembles for that song are loaded automatically. It is a pity that they are not loaded by default, but still it IS workable, and all soft synths are playing as expected.

Another major production tool for me has been my Virus TI (even Vince has been having fun with that one) and that has also been a little erratic loading up the correct sounds, even though it worked great in Falmouth and on my G5 before I went to Falmouth. If the song is saved without the Virus loading correctly, then the next time the song is opened the Virus does not load any correct sounds, and you have to go back to an earlier song and re-import the sounds. Workable, but irritating! Great sounds they are though.

On Thursday I called Anne at Mute to check if my backups and SE Reflexion filter had arrived from the USA, and she sent them over, together with an SSL Duende that M had organised for me. I will be mixing this record "in the box". I really like the "recallability" of this style of mixing (just to be able to get a bit of distance from the song and then work on it for half an hour if necessary - great!) and I have had some great results with it. I sub mix to stems of course and then I combine these stems in the TotalMix of my RME Fireface. This gives me a deep and large sound.

I have been working with the Powercore for a long time, and the Waves APA44M, and recently have added the UAD-1 and the LiquidMix to my setup. These 3 pieces are all working very well together. My challenge now is to add the Duende to this setup. I got the Duende working really easily on its own - and it brought a smile to my face to hear that "SSL sound" that I know so well (from the 80s onwards). Very characteristic and enjoyable at extreme EQ and compression settings.


Anyway I have tried 2 different PCI cards to add extra Firewire busses to my system to cope with all this and both seem to have their issues. In fact Belkin tell me that the F5U508 I bought from the Applestore will not work with my system, and I should get an F5U504, so I will try that next week. The F5U508 kind of works, (and supplies power to the Liquid Mix) but I have to keep replugging things to keep them recognised.

Both the F5U508 and the Sonnet Allegro card prevent the LiquidMix working on the Mac Firewire buss. Focusrite tell me the solution is to put the LiquidMix on the PCI card Firewire buss, and it kind of works with the F5U508. I must get some longer Firewire 400-800 cables to see if I can get it to function better with the Sonnet. (but there is no buss power on the Sonnet I believe)

I am anticipating using an Intel machine as a Node, and to this end I have also bought a PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet from Small Tree so that I can easily run the APA as well, but at the moment this is not working either. Small Tree are being VERY helpful. It may be that there is sufficient bandwidth on the built in Gigabit ethernet to run the APA and a Node for Logic. I already have a high speed NetGear hub to try this too.

And so it goes on......