Cross platform collaboration

It took me a lot of time and effort, but with the addition of Apple’s Logic Studio Pro, I finally felt like the music studio was up and running. It has been exciting at band practice the last few weeks, as we review our work at the end of the evening. The ease of instant review was a treat, and I was excited to get the band in the studio actually recording, not just rehearsing.

Then I got an email from my guitar player.

He and I are not always on the same page, despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact) that he is also my brother-in-law. As I was struggling to finally, after ten years, to get our studio together, he had been spending some time in the music shops working on his own little project. He wound up buying a headphone amp and a Tascam portable 8-track recorder. And in his email, he included links to the tracks that he and our bass player had laid down. “Can you add some drums to these,” he asked, innocently.

At first I was a bit put out. After all my effort, here he had done an end run around me and slipped into a completely different recording mode. But I went to work anyway.

The tracks he sent had already traveled a good deal. Tascam records them to compact flash media but has to transfer them to an internal hard drive before moving them to a computer via a USB cable. He then converted them into .wav files before uploading the to Dropbox on the web, where I was able to download them using the public link.

Now they were on my desktop, but what was I going to do with them? They wouldn’t open in Logic, unfortunately, but Garageband opened them right up. I did some minor editing and mixing and then bounced the track, with lead vocals, back up vocals, lead guitar, rhythm guitar and bass guitar. I then added a drum loop to play against and went to work adding my drum parts.

After three takes, I quit recording and mixed the whole project down (pulling the drum loop out of the mix, of course). I was later able to transfer it into Logic, where I have since been mixing and remixing, learning the platform better and (hopefully) creating a better song. (I am still excited about Logic, and since my studio has much better mics, it will still serve us well.)

The quality of the little Tascam was best for the guitars; it failed somewhat for vocals, capturing way to much pop and breath hiss. But as a tool for getting our recording project up and off the ground, it worked like a charm. Now the whole band is eager to record in earnest, and we can always lay new vocals on top of what we have.

The last thing my guitar player did before leaving practice? Tell me about a little open-source program called Audacity that has many of the tools available in both Garageband and Logic Pro. And the cost? Free.