In my last post i listed all of the gear i frequently use. This time, i'm going to focus on my basic setup and describe some of the ways i patch it all together.
There's no smoking gun or secret special hardware, just a common laptop. Some specs:
HP G60 Pentium
KXStudio
64-bit Ubuntu 14.04
Kernal: 3.13.0-24-lowlatency
Buffer: 512 samples
Frequency: 44.1kHz
Latency: 11.6ms
CPU Scaling: on demand
I don't remember how much ram or storage it has, but it was straight off the shelf in the mid to late '00s. It came with windows 7, but everthing is accessible from the linux side (dual boot), and the very few windows programs i need to access work passably well with Wine. I have several other computers, but the laptop is the only one i use for recording. As for the specs above, the 512 sample buffer at cd quality is perfectly fine for me. My physical accuracy is only a tiny bit better than 11ms, so it doesn't need to be better (i don't play fast enough to feel it and my margin for error at the ictus probably ranges from 9 to 15ms at my sharpest; just a guess).
I do get the occasional xrun or cluster burst, but only when i've left a lot of child processes running or forget to close everything down when i leave for several hours. I just make a habit of closing everything down when i stop for more than an hour, and restart the jack server every session (and whenever dsp load gets too heavy in-session).
Very few of the programs i use are prone to crashing, but some do occasionally crash or freeze and force a hard reboot. Muse (midi sampler/workstation) is probably the least stable, but it's usually my own fault.
I've used many modular trackers, recorders, environments, etc., but my current DAWs of choice are Ardour 3 for multi-track recording, and Audacity for wave editing. I was a long time cool edit pro 2 user until Adobe bought it, but i've grown to like Ardour's internal data approach (no wav files hogging hard drive space unless you manually export them). It's a minor nuisance to export from one to the other then import back into the mix (i prefer destructive editing over bussed real-time plugins).
I'm not a very good or thoughtful recording engineer, so none of my tracks get labeled properly, i change layering and arrangement mid session, i detest effects/group busses (i like to mixdown old school 4-track style and only when absolutely necessary), i leave empty space and muted fragments lying around everywhere, and i make no effort to crossfade or splice segments properly. Remember kids, i'm a hack and i wouldn't even dream of handing anything i do over to a professional. I do all tweaking up front and build my sound from the final playback. What you hear is pretty much what i heard while recording; i occasionally tweak eq on the final mix while normalizing/compressing but 90 to 95% of my sounds and levels are dialed in before i even hit record.
Everything i do either uses internal samplers and software synths, or else gets converted to digital by mixer via usb, and everything gets dumped into one or more tracks in ardour. Sometimes i use a lot of external gear, sometimes i just plug straight into the board.
Most often, i plug guitars and bass into an acoustic amp, take the pre power amp d/i output from the amp to the mixer via xlr into the mixer's mic preamp and adjust gain levels as necessary. I like the hot signal it gives me (my knobs and faders get turned way down but it means i can drive any component into clipping if i want the distortion it makes). It also means that if i really try to shorten cables and keep early stages clean i can significantly reduce the final noise floor without algorithmic reduction and the inherent loss of tone that brings. For example, some of my poorly constructed signal chains produce a powerful 4k-ish hiss by the time it reaches the DAW, which just so happens to be where my pick noise and attack are most prominent; so, the softer i try to make the hiss, the less brightness and clarity in my guitar parts.
My power supplies are also dirty: i can get distinct hisses and hums at 40hz, 60hz, 100hz, and their harmonics if i try (cool if you want it, horrible if your sound source is an unamplified violin or acoustic guitar more than 1 inch from a mic).
I don't use outboard or pedal effects very much. I run most every sound source through Guitarix.
As for what actual gear i use for a particular recording, i just plug some things together and see where it leads. I'm interested in the act of creating recorded music itself, not so much the end product or performing a score. I think of the recording process as the actual artwork. Think of it this way; a painting isn't the names of the colors, the brush and canvas material, and the subject, the "painting" is a person acquiring the materials, mixing paint and additives, physical gestures, and interpretion of a visual or imagined scene, bundled up into a visual artifact. Likewise, my "music" is piecing gear together, making up notes and rhythms and counterpoint from the sounds of that gear, and bundling it all up into a reproducable aural experience. That's part of why i favor cheap, easy to acquire gear.
It's also, i think, the major source of confusion about my music. I am (like most musicians) an introvert and an unrelenting perfectionist. If i went about writing music the normal way, nothing would ever be good enough for other people to hear; i would throw away everything i write or perform. In order to get it out into the world, i have to create an environment where i have no control over the minute details: i have to pick an unchangeable tone,
improvise, plan, and execute the recording all in one go so that there can never be a "better take," (if i can't remember what i played, i can't agonize over timing articulation inflection etc.). The mistakes are important as well: my compositional process (the looping in particular) forces me to either accept the mistakes as part of the piece, or risk losing the entire feel and shape of the piece because i can't remember the really awesome parts during the next attempt and the evolving synth patches won't produce quite the same timber/character each time. Basically, every piece is a live realtime improvisation for an imaginary audience and all i can do with the end result is make it as interesting and non-painful to listen to as possible.
I got off track from my original topic, but i always do that. Thanks for reading.
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