Thanks!..I've been blown away by some of the Amp Farm stuff.
The official "El Borrachito" Q&A thread
- Thread starter Mark Wein
- Start date
Thanks!..I've been blown away by some of the Amp Farm stuff.
El Borrachito
Premier Staff
Flopping around in show business
Is spent most of high school playing guitar, making four track recordings, and running sound for my friends. By the time I started college I had an associates degree in hearing damage.
I studied guitar in college while simultaneously playing gigs and doing all of the composing and recording I could. I got more than one lecture about how my outside activities interfered with my schooling. "Oh, you mean my career? Sorry about that." I learned a lot in college. About music, certainly, but also about managing big egos, navigating bureaucracy, and enduring people who will treat anyone they can like a peon. It was much better training for the real music business than I realized.
My last year of college I got my first full time, entry level job working as a cartage guy. This job entailed schlepping instruments and audio rentals in and out of every studio in town. I enjoyed this most of the time. It gave me a great fly-on-the-wall view of the music business and I met many talented people. To this day I'm regularly working with people I met during this time. After about a year, one of the clients- a TV composer- was getting busy and asked me if I knew someone who was interested in being his assistant. The following week I was working for him. This job entailed mostly turning written scores into midi sequences and keeping the substantial amount of equipment running smoothly. We used Performer running on a Mac Iic and two racks full of synths and Roland S-760s. After the sequences were prepared, all this gear was moved to the studio- by someone else now -where the musicians would play along with the sequenced material and it would all be recorded live. Ahh, the good old days… This was my introduction to the discipline of composing to picture. I thought I had a great break, but it was short-lived. Both shows we had were cancelled abruptly within days of each other. I didn’t know it then, but I wouldn’t work on a TV show again for over four years.
Another friend I had met as a cartage guy was managing a recording studio. He hired me as an assistant engineer. Though I had been recording myself and doing sessions for others at hole-in-the wall studios for years, my formal training was minimal. Since I was used to being the engineer, it wasn’t very exciting. It was, however, an education in how real records with real budgets were made. This friend went on to open his own studio. My loyalty was rewarded when he hired me as staff engineer. Though the title was more prestigious, I was in reality the sole employee. I was responsible for duties from cleaning, to phantom producing major label artists for never-there producers. Generally I was the assistant engineer on big projects or the engineer on smaller ones.
Around this time Pro Tools was becoming an integral part of the recording process. (This was 1999-2001.) I was already familiar with digital editing, but far from an expert. It was pretty obvious that this was the way things were going, so I bought an 001 and learned how to use it. At the time, tape was still the principal medium. Pro Tools was still a fairly expensive rental item. I managed to scrounge up enough money to buy a rentable 24-channel Pro Tools system. At the time, there was almost always a system rented in on any session we had. That system was now my system. It paid for itself in a few months. Often my system was making more on a session than I was! This changed my life. For the first time I had excess income- and the security that comes with it. I also developed a very useful set of skills. Skills that now define modern recording. Since then, I have also had the capacity to create music anywhere, any time that owning a Pro Tools system allows.
By 2001 two important things happened. First, Pro Tools became the principal recording medium. This meant most studios now included it as part of the room. The ability to rent my system for extended periods on record projects dwindled. Secondly, the record business went in the toilet. This meant fewer albums made for smaller budgets. Tape became a luxury. Having artists in the room working stuff out became too time consuming (ie. expensive). The approach shifted to getting the band in and out of the room as quickly as possible, leaving most of the work to the nerds twiddling away on computers. Working like this was more like being an accountant than a recording engineer.
The next thing that happened to me was the single luckiest break I have ever had. My buddy, the TV composer from paragraph three, called me out of the blue and asked me if I was busy. I said, “Not really.” (This is what you always say until you know what the gig is.) He said he had just been hired on a show called Malcolm In The Middle. I hadn’t seen it, but it was a big hit already. The pay was about what I was making already, but the promise of leaving behind 80-hour workweeks in an industry with an uncertain future was appealing.
I started on Malcolm on September 10th, 2001. On Tuesday I stayed home.
My five years at Malcolm was the equivalent of a master’s degree in scoring for single-camera comedy. At some point I used every skill I had, played every instrument I knew how to play, sang, whistled, acted (badly), and created all kinds of wacky stuff I would have never even dreamed of: An organ made of household items, an opera written by a 10-year-old (played by a real orchestra), Ode to Joy played on pots and pans, a Jimi Hendrix style version of “Oh Canada”, a techo version of “Sometimes When We Touch”, and countless other things like that. It was fun to go to work every day. We knew we were making classic TV. Everyone was motivated to make it as good as it could be.
One of my main duties on Malcolm was to handle the music editing. I hadn’t done much of this before, but my pre-existing Pro Tools skills made easy for me to focus on learning the cinematic and people-management aspects of the job. By the time Malcolm was done I knew what I needed to be a competent music editor. The less demanding schedule and summers off also made it possible to see my wife and do other gigs as well.
Since then, I have worked mostly as a music editor and composer assistant on a number of shows. The trick now is to branch out into other TV genres. It’s not always easy, since people are reluctant to hire someone who isn’t experienced in a particular genre. My persistence has gradually been rewarded over the last couple years. Now I am just as comfortable on a one-hour drama or cartoon. Comedy is still my favorite, though. Other genres have a style that changes very little from week to week. With comedy, you never know what they will ask for. It’s often a lot of work, but it beats flipping burgers.
Is spent most of high school playing guitar, making four track recordings, and running sound for my friends. By the time I started college I had an associates degree in hearing damage.
I studied guitar in college while simultaneously playing gigs and doing all of the composing and recording I could. I got more than one lecture about how my outside activities interfered with my schooling. "Oh, you mean my career? Sorry about that." I learned a lot in college. About music, certainly, but also about managing big egos, navigating bureaucracy, and enduring people who will treat anyone they can like a peon. It was much better training for the real music business than I realized.
My last year of college I got my first full time, entry level job working as a cartage guy. This job entailed schlepping instruments and audio rentals in and out of every studio in town. I enjoyed this most of the time. It gave me a great fly-on-the-wall view of the music business and I met many talented people. To this day I'm regularly working with people I met during this time. After about a year, one of the clients- a TV composer- was getting busy and asked me if I knew someone who was interested in being his assistant. The following week I was working for him. This job entailed mostly turning written scores into midi sequences and keeping the substantial amount of equipment running smoothly. We used Performer running on a Mac Iic and two racks full of synths and Roland S-760s. After the sequences were prepared, all this gear was moved to the studio- by someone else now -where the musicians would play along with the sequenced material and it would all be recorded live. Ahh, the good old days… This was my introduction to the discipline of composing to picture. I thought I had a great break, but it was short-lived. Both shows we had were cancelled abruptly within days of each other. I didn’t know it then, but I wouldn’t work on a TV show again for over four years.
Another friend I had met as a cartage guy was managing a recording studio. He hired me as an assistant engineer. Though I had been recording myself and doing sessions for others at hole-in-the wall studios for years, my formal training was minimal. Since I was used to being the engineer, it wasn’t very exciting. It was, however, an education in how real records with real budgets were made. This friend went on to open his own studio. My loyalty was rewarded when he hired me as staff engineer. Though the title was more prestigious, I was in reality the sole employee. I was responsible for duties from cleaning, to phantom producing major label artists for never-there producers. Generally I was the assistant engineer on big projects or the engineer on smaller ones.
Around this time Pro Tools was becoming an integral part of the recording process. (This was 1999-2001.) I was already familiar with digital editing, but far from an expert. It was pretty obvious that this was the way things were going, so I bought an 001 and learned how to use it. At the time, tape was still the principal medium. Pro Tools was still a fairly expensive rental item. I managed to scrounge up enough money to buy a rentable 24-channel Pro Tools system. At the time, there was almost always a system rented in on any session we had. That system was now my system. It paid for itself in a few months. Often my system was making more on a session than I was! This changed my life. For the first time I had excess income- and the security that comes with it. I also developed a very useful set of skills. Skills that now define modern recording. Since then, I have also had the capacity to create music anywhere, any time that owning a Pro Tools system allows.
By 2001 two important things happened. First, Pro Tools became the principal recording medium. This meant most studios now included it as part of the room. The ability to rent my system for extended periods on record projects dwindled. Secondly, the record business went in the toilet. This meant fewer albums made for smaller budgets. Tape became a luxury. Having artists in the room working stuff out became too time consuming (ie. expensive). The approach shifted to getting the band in and out of the room as quickly as possible, leaving most of the work to the nerds twiddling away on computers. Working like this was more like being an accountant than a recording engineer.
The next thing that happened to me was the single luckiest break I have ever had. My buddy, the TV composer from paragraph three, called me out of the blue and asked me if I was busy. I said, “Not really.” (This is what you always say until you know what the gig is.) He said he had just been hired on a show called Malcolm In The Middle. I hadn’t seen it, but it was a big hit already. The pay was about what I was making already, but the promise of leaving behind 80-hour workweeks in an industry with an uncertain future was appealing.
I started on Malcolm on September 10th, 2001. On Tuesday I stayed home.
My five years at Malcolm was the equivalent of a master’s degree in scoring for single-camera comedy. At some point I used every skill I had, played every instrument I knew how to play, sang, whistled, acted (badly), and created all kinds of wacky stuff I would have never even dreamed of: An organ made of household items, an opera written by a 10-year-old (played by a real orchestra), Ode to Joy played on pots and pans, a Jimi Hendrix style version of “Oh Canada”, a techo version of “Sometimes When We Touch”, and countless other things like that. It was fun to go to work every day. We knew we were making classic TV. Everyone was motivated to make it as good as it could be.
One of my main duties on Malcolm was to handle the music editing. I hadn’t done much of this before, but my pre-existing Pro Tools skills made easy for me to focus on learning the cinematic and people-management aspects of the job. By the time Malcolm was done I knew what I needed to be a competent music editor. The less demanding schedule and summers off also made it possible to see my wife and do other gigs as well.
Since then, I have worked mostly as a music editor and composer assistant on a number of shows. The trick now is to branch out into other TV genres. It’s not always easy, since people are reluctant to hire someone who isn’t experienced in a particular genre. My persistence has gradually been rewarded over the last couple years. Now I am just as comfortable on a one-hour drama or cartoon. Comedy is still my favorite, though. Other genres have a style that changes very little from week to week. With comedy, you never know what they will ask for. It’s often a lot of work, but it beats flipping burgers.
T-BoneBarnet
Kick Henry Jackassowski
I sometimes wonder how common this is. Just as an example, Brendan O'Brien's records all share a similar sound, which suggests he's there from start to finish. Same with Rick Rubin's earlier records, but then somewhere in the late 90's/early 2000's his records started sounding very "un-Rick-Rubinesque".
Prages
User Error
Big. Fast.
The more of those, the better.
At least that's my take on it.
I guess USB vs. Firewire...on my desktop I have a Firewire drive but I haven't gotten one for the big studio yet so I'm using a USB drive in the mean time...
El Borrachito
Premier Staff
Get a couple good-sized firewire drives. One for projects and the other as an offline backup. With time machine, this is pretty easy to do now.
El Borrachito
Premier Staff
El Borrachito
Premier Staff
Oh yeah, make sure they're 7200 rpm.
do you shut time machine down while you're doing sessions?
El Borrachito
Premier Staff
Make it so your offline backup drive is off at all times except when you are ready to back up. Set time machine up to do backups only when you want to. Turn the drive on, run the backup, turn it back off.
Kelly
24 Steel Wheels of Shoegaze
Macs. :rolleyes:
Kerouac
weird musical dildo
telecaster911
Kick Henry Jackassowski
What options are ther for recording 8 simultaneous tracks? Obviously there's the firepod stuff, but what else?
Peeker
jerkass
ah, that explains it.It's a Mac thing.