Just the thought of Linux conjures up many different variants of emotion. For some, there are thoughts of freedom; for others there are thoughts of horror as hours of lives have been lost trying to configure this beast. But Linux is a tremendous gift to the Pro Audio community and society as a whole.

A few months ago a friend of mine (who has a habit of buying anything cheap just to see what it will do) purchased a pair of Cascade Fat Head II mics.  Since I had no experience with ribbon mics at the time (and he was busy recording a live show) I picked them up to see what they sounded like.  As it turned out, they are great little mics.

Getting a good kick drum sound often seems more like luck than skill. It's all too common: a small, thuddy kick. Poor attack. No tone, or bad tone. The kick doesn't cut through... or, if it does, it sounds so bad, you wish it didn't.  Fortunately, there's new help for your limp, flaccid kick drum.

Recording an album without a record deal is a challenge, to say the least. It can put a strain on your finances, your relationships and your sanity. I am currently trying to finish my second album, and the experience has been almost as painful as my first album. However, I have learned a lot and I hope my next one will be a breeze. I am one of those “engineers” that doesn’t really think of himself as an engineer. I am first and foremost a songwriter. I play guitar, keyboards, bass and drums. I sing because I have never been able to find a singer that could sing my songs the way I wanted. I guess I live by the old adage “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” It is easy to find talented people, but it is much more difficult to find talented people who share your taste and vision. Furthermore, even if you find people that are talented and share your vision, they rarely exhibit the level of commitment required in order to bring a project to fruition. It’s a “show me the money”...

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Dumbass - noun - A stupid person; these words are used to express a low opinion of someone's intelligence.

If you’re one of the many aspiring songwriters / musicians / engineers out there that is trying to record an album independently, you have two choices: Record the album yourself at home or go to a “professional” studio. Unless you have years of audio engineering experience, the latter choice will surely yield better results. If you want a CD that will be competitive with major label CD’s, you should hire professionals. If your sole goal is to become a professional audio engineer and you have some songs of your own that you want to record, you also have two choices: Record the album yourself at home or go to a “professional” studio. At this point, you might ask “Why should I go to a studio and have someone else record it for me when I have a degree in audio engineering?” Yes, you may have a degree and you may have recorded your friend’s band for your school project...

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I’ve spent most of the last decade involved in remote collaboration as a tech support engineer for ednet, whose primary business model is real-time, remote audio collaboration via ISDN & IP for the advertising, post / ADR, and music markets. It's a high-end, niche business that works very well for studios needing what we like to call "CD-quality phone calls". During this time, my project studio has also needed to collaborate with other studios over long distances. Typically, I address this by primitive (fedexing or mailing CDs/ DVDs), or mid-tech (emailing .mp3s, FTP) means.

Unfortunately, these solutions are not suited to a real-time collaborative experience. Mail and Fedex obviously won’t work. ISDN and IP come close, but coding and transmission delays are greater than acceptable for two studios playing music together live. MPEG layer 3 coding delays on dedicated hardware can be up to a third of a second, and even the fastest compression algorithm I have experience...

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Two questions perenially surface in the world of pro audio:

1. Why are Macs dominant in pro audio, when Windows has such overwhelming market share?

2. Should I get a Mac or PC for recording?

By now you've probably been wondering where we've been. To tell the truth, so have we.

Well, ProRec's demise is a powerful testimonial to the importance of a robust data backup strategy. After over eight years of uninterrupted service, our main web server experienced a (third) failure of its RAID array, and the entire contents of the server were utterly corrupted.

Normally, this would not have been such a disaster. Because, over the same eight years, I maintained a live mirror of the site at another location. The mirror - updated every 15 minutes - was an exact replica of the main site. In just a few hours following the complete loss of the main site, I could have the DNS redirected to the mirror server, and ProRec would magically come back online.

However, as is often the case, Murphy had other plans.

A Perfect Storm It's really amazing how events conspired against us this time. Because, as it turns out, the mirror site was temporarily unavailable. Worse, it was undergoing a one-time rebuild - and its mirrored contents were temporarily erased with the intention of rebuilding them from the main site. So when the main site was lost, there was no mirror, and no way to restore the mirror.

...

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In my last studio, I was fortunate to have a great sounding control room. I can’t take any credit for this; it was sheer luck-of-the-draw. Some interplanetary alignment of room dimensions, carpeting type, and speaker placement converged to give me a near-perfect listening environment. There was no need for any kind of special room treatment. The mids were smooth and offered precise imaging, and the bass response was very flat down to a solid 30 Hz. I got a little spoiled. However I got the opportunity to relocate the studio to a new location with a larger and much better sounding tracking room, and had to take the offer. In most ways the new studio is superior to the old one – all except for the control room. The new studio’s control room is a too-small 8 by 13 foot operation, with a roof that’s just a little too low, and severe bass response issues. After a few weeks of working in the new control room I had started to adapt to the room’s anomalies by trusting my gut (instead of my ears) about the bass...

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I’ve been a fan of Cakewalk music software ever since Greg Hendershott was the only employee. Cakewalk has always had a good combination of usability, power, and relative simplicity. When the application added audio in the mid 1990s, it wasn’t clear at first if the application would remain a “MIDI sequencer with some audio features” or if it was on a track to become an “audio multitrack with MIDI”. Many arguments have ensued about what was, and what should be the direction of the product. When the product was renamed “SONAR” it removed any doubt: the mission was multitrack audio. And with SONAR 4, Cakewalk has reached a level of sophistication that most of us doubted for years it would ever reach. When it comes to multitrack audio recording, SONAR 4 is the best of breed, managing to somehow combine terrific power, performance, and usability into a single elegant package. For people unfamiliar with SONAR, a complete rundown of its capabilities would (and does) fill a book. I cannot devote time in this review...

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When I moved into my new facility at Pleasantry Lane studios, I made a commitment: no new rack gear, and no mixers. I am on a quest to downsize the hardware and optimize my use of a pure computer-based approach to engineering. Of course, when swearing off mixers, one quickly bumps one’s head against the problem of monitoring. You need some kind of control over the monitors, you still need a talkback, you need a headphone mix and you need a little routing so you can play back CDs or record to a cassette deck. What you need is for someone to take the master section from a large-footprint studio console and cook it down into a little box for DAW users. You need a Big Knob.

Mackie’s big knob was designed with the DAW user in mind. The unit features a large, high-quality volume knob, low noise op-amps, a small but useful set of inputs and outputs, a talkback section, three headphone outputs, and other nifty features for DAW users.

Ins and Outs The Big Knob gives you five inputs: two 2-track inputs, a master DAW input, a phono input, and a phones mix input. Any of the first four can be routed to any output. The phones mix input allows you to route a custom mix to the headphones while monitoring a different mix.

...

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The Ball from Blue Microphones is Blue’s first entry into the dynamic market after a successful string of highly regarded condenser mics. I was approached about reviewing the Ball at summer NAMM and took Blue up on the offer. I’m always up for test-driving new gear. The Ball arrived a few weeks later, along with a “Blueberry” mic cable (optional). The Ball is quite a unique microphone. For starters, it’s a big blue ball, about the size of a softball. The Ball certainly continues Blue’s tradition of making colorful, visually striking mics with interesting names, not model numbers. The Ball comes packaged in a cardboard box with Styrofoam packing. You also get a manual/application guide that perhaps tries a little too hard to be funny. At least it’s a light read. Retail price is $279. Street price is about $200. There’s more to the Ball than just a pretty face. The Ball is the world’s first phantom-powered dynamic microphone. The circuitry in the Ball provides a constant...

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Blue Microphones was kind enough to send me their Kiwi mic for a test drive at the same time they sent me their new Ball mic for review. Truth be told, I love microphones. I don’t think you can have too many of them, especially if they have a distinctive sound. This would be my first opportunity to use a Blue condenser mic and I was anxious to try the Kiwi.The Kiwi is Blue’s top of the line solid-state mic. The Kiwi is a large-diaphragm multi-pattern condenser microphone featuring discrete Class A electronics with a transformerless output. The classic “lollipop on a bottle” type design and rich green paint certainly make it a striking and handsome mic. The Kiwi also distinguishes itself by offering NINE, count ‘em, nine pickup patterns. Besides the expected cardiod, omni and figure 8 patterns, you also get three “sub-cardiod” variations (between cardiod and omni), as well as three super-cardiod patterns (between...

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When I was building out the space for our new studio, one thing started to annoy me. The studio was constructed as a production studio, with a separate control room and nice big tracking room. I loved the layout, but I spend a lot of time tracking... myself. In the old space, the DAW was in the primary tracking room - it was a working musician's workshop - so I could, for example, set up the drums right at the computer, and run the rig from the drum kit. But in this space, with its dedicated control and tracking rooms, I would be forced to trek back and forth from the recorder to the instrument whenever I was recording myself. What I needed was a remote. Back in the day, we had remote controllers for our recorders. Whether this was a simple "record" button attached to the deck by a wire, or a complete remote unit on the ADATs, you could generally remote control the recorder from anywhere in the studio, if you had enough wire. But, now that the recorder is a computer, how is one supposed to handle...

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Five years ago or so, Ocean Way opened a facility in Nashville. They bought an old stone church at 1200 17th Avenue South. They converted it into a recording studio, and took what I assume was the rectory next door, and turned it into offices. The main room is where the pews would have been, and the stained glass windows are still in place. This lends a very nice light in the space, though everyone who looks out the windows might not approve of the religious images that they see. The woodwork is a light and airy raw sienna color, and is quite attractive. The space that would have housed the altar and back have been converted into a control room holding a large Neve console with GML automation, a machine room, a booth holding a grand piano, and various smaller rooms. Today, just in front of the control booth glass is a temporary stage made from risers, a center stage podium, and a table and chairs to each side. Flanking the riser is a PA system made up of Genelecs and small traps. Today there is...